In many
GUI environments, including
Microsoft Windows and most
desktop environments based on the
X Window System, and in applications such as
word processing software running in those environments, control-V can be used to
paste text or other content (if supported) from the
clipboard at the current
cursor position. Control-V was one of a handful of
keyboard sequences chosen by the program designers at
Xerox PARC to control
text editing.
Unix interactive terminals use
Control-V to mean "the next character should be treated literally" (the
mnemonic here is "V for verbatim"). This allows a user to insert a literal
Control-C or
Control-H or similar control characters that would otherwise be handled by the terminal. This behavior was copied by text editors like
vi and Unix
shells like
bash and
tcsh, which offer text editing on the command line. == Representation ==