Copy on select in Terminal?

[hazmat]

One thing that always screws me up is that selected text in Terminal is not copied automatically. Anyone know of any way to do this? I haven't figured it out yet, but since OS X allows swapping of caps lock and control, I wonder if maybe there's a hidden function for this.

Thanks.


-Ken

[hayne]

If you mean that you need to use Cmd-C to copy the selected text to the clipboard, that is nothing unusual - it's the same in all Mac applications.
Perhaps you are used to X Window apps where you can select then paste with the middle mouse button. The Mac way requires more keypresses (or mouse clicks if you use the Edit menu) but it is more versatile.

[hazmat]

I know about Mac clipboards. And Unix. And Windows. ;) A lot of telnet/ssh clients for Windows have copy-on-select options. I would like to see that in Terminal.app, or was hoping to find some hack to do that. A lot of non-standard things are possible. In one of the system files you can add a few lines to swap caps lock and control.

[blb]

My gut feeling is that this would require some changes to the Terminal source, as the window would have to do a pasteboard copy on highlight.

[mervTormel]

if you select text in the shell, then click-drag the selection, the cursor modifies to cursor+ and if you release, your selection is pasted.

not exactly copy-on-select, more of a copy/paste-on-drag.

care must be exercised with a bare command line and copying newlines.

you can cancel this behavior by holding control or option and releasing the selection, or by dragging the selection to the menubar and realeasing it.

someone might check if this is a hint at the main site, and if not, may submit it for non-forum trollers.

[hayne]

If you want to paste the selected text immediately (as opposed to saving it for later), you can use the Terminal's "Paste Selection" command - see the Edit menu.

[hazmat]

Originally posted by hayne
If you want to paste the selected text immediately (as opposed to saving it for later), you can use the Terminal's "Paste Selection" command - see the Edit menu.

I have 'paste' assigned to the middle mouse button. But hmmm, I'll look into that when I get home. Run Win2k at work. I hope there's a key combo to I can map it to a mouse button or combo.

mervTormel: Thanks. That sounds interesting. I'll check that out. I hate having to wait to get home just to try things like this.

[hayne]

The keyboard shortcut for Paste Selection is Shift-Cmd-V.

[hazmat]

Originally posted by hayne
The keyboard shortcut for Paste Selection is Shift-Cmd-V.

Oh, very cool. Thinking about that, it's a pretty cool way to do a sort of dirty copy-on-select, but only for within the terminal. I have to see and decide if it ends up being more confusing than it's worth between the terminal and other apps that I might want to copy text into from the terminal.

Was Paste Selection in 10.1 as well?

[osxpez]

Couldn't the middle mouse button be bound to Paste selection?

[hazmat]

Originally posted by osxpez
Couldn't the middle mouse button be bound to Paste selection?

Absolutely. That's why I asked if there was a key combo for it.

[blb]

Originally posted by hazmat
...
Was Paste Selection in 10.1 as well?
Nope, that and merv's trick aren't possible in 10.1.

[hazmat]

Wow, that select and drag will come in REALLY useful. Thanks for the tip, merv! As far as Paste Selection, unfortunately it's not good enough for me and wore out really quickly. It's too limiting to the one terminal window. Can't paste outside the one, and can't copy the clipboard in. No good for a mouse button mapping. As far as dragging selected text, the only thing about dragging it to another terminal window is that it would be nice to have the other window pop to the front, to see where you will be pasting, you know?