Another vote for "the Command key" (specifically, a modifier key distinct from the Control key on which to put the "more modern" shortcuts like copy, paste, kill window).

But then I was on text-mode Linux (and before that, text-mode Unix) for many years. I would understand if someone used to Windows did not like it.

I have the opposite problem. There's one command - I think it's probably <C-w> (split screens in Vim) that I always hit every time I'm using a Mac, and it inevitably closes my entire terminal.

The nice thing about Linux is that I can at least remap these keybindings. On OS X, it's literally impossible to do a perfect remapping of the keys (trust me. I've tried.)

Hopefully I've saved recently (or run the process inside GNU screen....).

Cmd-W in OSX is default for close window, so that's probably it.

You say you've tried to fix it.. Have you tried these?

In Terminal.app, find the setting for "don't close this window unless no commands are running", and select it.

Or, in System Prefs/Keyboard/mappings or somesuch, override Cmd-W in Terminal.app to a noop.

If by <C-w> you mean control-w (I'm a vi user and don't know!), also take a look here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497258

No, I already remap Caps_Lock to Esc - much more useful.

I agree with your general point. I dislike most things about mac but their extra keys do make sense.

But control-c should not kill your session, only the currently running process. Control-d is what kills sessions. If you have no current foreground process the shell just starts a new input line. Still could be real bad obviously if a process is killed.

You're right. It didn't kill the session, it killed the process (Nutch (a search engine) was at its last stages of computing PageRank for tens of thousands of pages, which takes quite a while).

Thing is that you can't blame the keyboard for a PEBCAK. We all encounter that "never forget" moments at some point. Having a Command key is a moot point as the whole purpose of power user tools is this: having the power, and the consequences, at the finger tips. You know: "power is nothing without control", "with great power comes great responsibility", etc - stuff like this.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against specific boundaries for keeping people from doing potentially unwanted actions. But at some point, all the technical solutions to human errors are like sudo.

I watch co-workers struggle all day with their windows-based terminals logged into Linux machines. Copy is something like shift+insert or they have to go to edit > copy. So painful

Except for the fact that shift + insert is for pasting. ctrl + insert is for copy. Did not change till the old DOS days. Still works today, and even more, it works in my Konsole terminal emulator. There's nothing painful about that. Once you get it, it's like riding a bicycle.

Even more, selecting text for copy, then clicking a mouse button for paste is a pretty much standard workflow. putty uses the right click for paste, while Konsole / Gnome Terminal / etc. use the middle click for that. Don't know about other Windows terminal emulators though. The other emulators that I tried pretty much had the same underwhelming behavior as cmd.exe.