alt Hacker NewsControl-c meant cancel for decades before some idiot decided that it ought to mean copy instead.
As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.
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Ah yes, computing luminary Larry Tesler, what an idiot, working at Xerox PARC. Whoof.
Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.
> just type the chords correctly
Gee thanks.
I like to have my right hand on a mouse or trackpad, so two handed chords are much less convenient.
Macs manage to make one-handed chords for copy and paste ergonomic, but on a PC it's user error?