A Tiny Copy-and-Paste UX Paper Cut in Ubuntu

On a Mac, if you press Command+C without selecting anything, nothing happens. I didn't realize that someone had deliberately designed and implemented this behavior until I did the same thing on Ubuntu.

On Ubuntu, pressing Ctrl+C without selecting anything does two things:

• "\n" is copied to your clipboard; and
• whatever that has been in your clipboard is overwritten.

I'm talking as if this were an Ubuntu problem, but I don't really know. According to a Reddit comment, it is most likely handled by GNOME together with—in my case—X11.

You would think the clipboard would be a solved problem, given that it was invented in 1973.