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We use Ctrl+V to paste stuff from clipboard, but this is not working on terminal window.

What is the keyboard shortcut to paste on the GNOME terminal?

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  • 6
    Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V are the respective shortcuts. Another thing that also works with Linux (in general): if you mark a fragment of text, without any shortcut, you can paste it in by clicking the middle mouse button.
    – January
    Oct 18, 2012 at 12:27

4 Answers 4

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115

Have you tried using Ctrl + Shift + V

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    Why not just Ctrl + V ? I dont get it...
    – user1767754
    Jun 1, 2015 at 16:06
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    @user1767754 This shortcut is already used by most terminals to indicate that the next key should be inserted literally. This allows for example to insert a raw Tab character into terminal.
    – Jan Warchoł
    Nov 28, 2015 at 19:28
  • [Shift] + [Insert] works for paste sometimes
    – vineeshvs
    Dec 9, 2022 at 7:11
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You have to use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste into a terminal. Copy is similar; use Ctrl+Shift+C to copy from a terminal.

Arild's comment explains (edited a bit):

Following tradition, some Ctrl+(letter) shortcuts are mapped to entering control characters in the terminal (see How control characters map to keyboards on Wikipedia). That's why we cannot use them for copy and paste. The shortcuts can be overridden in Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, but especially Ctrl+C is useful to keep assigned to the control character ETX, which is used to interrupt the current command.

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    Following tradition, some Ctrl+(letter) shortcuts are mapped to entering control characters (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…) in the terminal. That's why we cannot use them for copy and paste. The shortcuts can be overridden in Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts..., but especially Ctrl+C is useful to keep assigned to the control character ETX, which is used to interrupt the current command.
    – Arild
    Aug 3, 2014 at 12:13
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Ctrl+Insert for 'copy', Shift+Delete for 'cut' and Shift+Insert for 'paste' also works on most places, including GNOME terminal.

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    Shift+Insert pastes "primary selection" (xsel). Ctrl+Shift+V pastes clipboard (xsel -b) on my machine (Ubuntu 16.04, GNOME Terminal).
    – jfs
    Sep 14, 2017 at 12:31
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Like said by others, Copy is CTRL + SHIFT + C and paste is CTRL + SHIFT + V as opposed to a normal text field.

So in short, just add shift to many other text editing shortcut to use it in the terminal.

Here are a couple examples:

Copy: CTRL + SHIFT + C

Paste: CTRL + SHIFT + V

Find: CTRL + SHIFT + F

Close terminal window: CTRL + SHIFT + W

Close all terminal windows: CTRL + SHIFT + Q

and etc.

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    (We're generally not supposed to use comments for +1, but I want to say this is an excellent first answer: concisely adds new info and improves on existing answers.)
    – chaskes
    Dec 25, 2017 at 1:04

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