Linux – the interrupt key for Linux command “less”

Have a look at the Sanos editor:

http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/editor.htm

Only a 28k binary can do what all those other editors try to -- and fail.

It does exactly what the OP asked for:

Shift+arrows to highlight text

Ctrl-X,C,V for cut/copy/paste

You can also have several open files simultaneously, and "pipe" commands into it. For example, press Ctrl-P and at the prompt enter:

cat yourfile

and it will insert yourfile at the position of the cursor. This way the full power of the bash commands are at your disposal ( use grep to get only specific parts of the file inserted ).

To understand the problem of why Ctrl + C does not work, it is very helpful to understand what happens when you press it:

Most shells bind Ctrl + C to "send a SIGINT signal to the program that currently runs in the foreground". You can read about the different signals via man signal:

 SIGINT        2       Term    Interrupt from keyboard

Programs can ignore that signal, as they can ignore SIGTSTP as well:

 SIGTSTP   18,20,24    Stop    Stop typed at tty

(Which is what most shells do when you press Ctrl + Z, which is why it is not guaranteed to work.)

There are some signals which can not be ignored by the process: SIGKILL, SIGSTOP and some others. You can send these signals via the kill command. So, to kill your hanging / zombieying process, just find the process ID (PID). For example, use pgrep or ps and then kill it:

 % kill -9 PID