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All these complains about "shortuts for copy-paste" are so confusing... COPY: select text with the mouse PASTE: middle click don't people use that? No need

All these complains about "shortuts for copy-paste" are so confusing... COPY: select text with the mouse PASTE: middle click don't people use that? No need for the keyboard at all! It works across all programs since forever (except inside jupyter notebooks on firefox, for some weird reason). If I had to single out a unique feature that makes linux worthwhile (as compared to windows or macos) it would be that one! Way ahead of anything else.

indigo945 2y ago
This does not work in a vertically split window inside a tmux session, for example. (Same with split buffers in vim, and so on.)
- deathanatos 2y ago
  … selection absolutely does work with a vertically split vim? If the desired selection is large and spans multiple lines, yeah, you're going to have a bad time doing it via the terminal emulator (but that has little to do with the split, other than splits make it more likely to wrap), but you can then just fall back asking vim to copy it to the selection. (This does get back at the complaint in TFA, though, that they're not the same, the moment we have to switch from the terminal to vim's command.) (All of this probably applies directly to tmux too, but I don't use tmux.)
- Henchman21 2y ago
  Selecting text with a mouse inside a tmux session absolutely honors splits so long as mouse support is enabled.
samspot 2y ago
What if you can't use the mouse?
WD-42 2y ago
I think it was more common until Apple normalized the one button mouse.
jimmaswell 2y ago
Where is that the case? Middle click copies the selection and right click pastes on every terminal emulator I use.
- h3half 2y ago
  I don't know the details for I am but a simple engineer. But using a government RHEL system a couple years ago, middle clock universally pasted whatever I had highlighted with the cursor. Didn't matter what program I was copying into or out of. I mostly used this to copy paste from a terminal into a COTS GUI tool, or from that tool into the OpenOffice (or maybe LibreOffice, I don't recall) spreadsheet program whatever that's called. Honestly it was incredibly useful and probably saved me collective hours over the few years I worked there Obviously this thread is about terminals, but the functionality does exist in some places
- tedunangst 2y ago
  All terminals are judged by how far they stray from xterm's light.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  Middle click to paste the most recently selected text is how the PRIMARY selection works in X Window [0], it's not specific to terminals. What terminals have middle-click-to-copy, right-click-to-paste? Sounds alien to me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection#Clipboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection#Clipboard
  - jimmaswell 2y ago
    > What terminals have middle-click-to-copy, right-click-to-paste? CMD on Windows, default PuTTy settings, WSL as well. I honestly haven't used GUIs on native Linux environments much, and when I have I must have changed the terminal emulator settings.
    - Sharlin 2y ago
      Ah, so Windows. Makes sense that it would have something completely different from everything else.

indigo945 2y ago

This does not work in a vertically split window inside a tmux session, for example. (Same with split buffers in vim, and so on.)

deathanatos 2y ago
… selection absolutely does work with a vertically split vim? If the desired selection is large and spans multiple lines, yeah, you're going to have a bad time doing it via the terminal emulator (but that has little to do with the split, other than splits make it more likely to wrap), but you can then just fall back asking vim to copy it to the selection. (This does get back at the complaint in TFA, though, that they're not the same, the moment we have to switch from the terminal to vim's command.) (All of this probably applies directly to tmux too, but I don't use tmux.)
Henchman21 2y ago
Selecting text with a mouse inside a tmux session absolutely honors splits so long as mouse support is enabled.

samspot 2y ago

What if you can't use the mouse?

WD-42 2y ago

I think it was more common until Apple normalized the one button mouse.

jimmaswell 2y ago

Where is that the case? Middle click copies the selection and right click pastes on every terminal emulator I use.

h3half 2y ago
I don't know the details for I am but a simple engineer. But using a government RHEL system a couple years ago, middle clock universally pasted whatever I had highlighted with the cursor. Didn't matter what program I was copying into or out of. I mostly used this to copy paste from a terminal into a COTS GUI tool, or from that tool into the OpenOffice (or maybe LibreOffice, I don't recall) spreadsheet program whatever that's called. Honestly it was incredibly useful and probably saved me collective hours over the few years I worked there Obviously this thread is about terminals, but the functionality does exist in some places
tedunangst 2y ago
All terminals are judged by how far they stray from xterm's light.
Sharlin 2y ago
Middle click to paste the most recently selected text is how the PRIMARY selection works in X Window [0], it's not specific to terminals. What terminals have middle-click-to-copy, right-click-to-paste? Sounds alien to me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection#Clipboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_selection#Clipboard
- jimmaswell 2y ago
  > What terminals have middle-click-to-copy, right-click-to-paste? CMD on Windows, default PuTTy settings, WSL as well. I honestly haven't used GUIs on native Linux environments much, and when I have I must have changed the terminal emulator settings.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    Ah, so Windows. Makes sense that it would have something completely different from everything else.