In most programs these days, you press Ctrl+C to copy to the clipboard.

In GNOME Terminal on Linux it's Ctrl+Shift+C and in PuTTY on Windows it happens as soon as you select some text.

This was confusing me until I found a great feature of GNOME Terminal:
  1. Click on the Edit menu, then on Keyboard Shortcuts...
  2. Click on Copy, then type Ctrl+C

Now Ctrl+C will act as copy if some text is selected, but it still acts as the interrupt key to stop a program if there's nothing selected.

The GNOME Edit Keyboard Shortcuts menu



Ctrl+C with something highlighted



Ctrl+C with nothing highlighted

Labels: , , ,

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This seems to be a good idea. Anyway, selecting text in Gnome-Terminal still sucks. Why isn't there no possibility to select (or copy) everything from the terminal ?

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for this! Always been an issue, but never seemed to remember to look for a solution. Now I have one. Thanks!

 
Blogger kurtdriver said...

Thanks Mike, but how do I highlight the entire text of an output? gnome-terminal only scrolls so far upwards and thus doesn't let me select the whole output. Thanks, Kurt

 
Blogger Mikel Ward said...

Kurt,

You'll have to change your preferences and specify a very large number under Edit->Current Profile->Scrolling

See http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-terminal/stable/gnome-terminal-prefs.html.en#gnome-terminal-prefs-scrolling for more details.

But if your program is producing a very large amount of output, it might be a better idea to redirect to a file using > or even | tee, for example:

ls -l | tee ls.out

will print the output to the screen and save it in ls.out.

 
Blogger Mikel Ward said...

This feature seems to have been removed in the latest development version of GNOME Terminal (git 2.27/svn r3419).

Of course, it could also have been caused by a change in GTK.

 
Blogger Badzil said...

Very helpful. I don't why I stuck so long with the mouse copy-and-paste. Thanks.

 

Post a Comment