How to paste in Cygwin bash using CTRL-V

This is my OLD blog. I've copied this post over to my NEW blog at:

http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/05/how-to-paste-in-cygwin-bash-using-ctrl/

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I come from a Windows background where Cut/Copy/Paste are almost always CTRL+X/C/V respectively. I like this consistency, so adjusting to Cygwin's (or other *nix environments') use of SHIFT+INSERT or the middle mouse button for pasting in terminals is a little annoying. After a bit of googling, I found a mailing list thread that solved my problem.

This method uses a modification to readline's ~/.inputrc configuration file, so it should work in rxvt, xterm, or even the default cmd.exe shell. Here is what to do:

Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

stty lnext ^q stop undef start undef

And add the following line to your ~/.inputrc:

"\C-v": paste-from-clipboard

These modifications will unmap stty's lnext (literal next-character) and readline's quoted-insert settings which are normally mapped to CTRL-V. For more details, see this cygwin mailing list thread.

Note, this appears to be a Cygwin-specific solution. Linux users could use custom key bindings in gnome-terminal or konsole, or translation tables with xterm.

Useful commands for reference:
$ bind -p
$ stty -a