cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 43 Posts
  • 257 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • “But you can’t copy with Ctrl+C, it’s…” - You can. When something is selected It copies selection to clipboard, otherwise it sends SIGINT.

    What terminal emulator are you using where ctrl-c copies instead of sending SIGINT when text is selected? In every one I’ve ever used, ctrl-c still sends SIGINT even with text selected (and one must must use ctrl-shift-C/ctrl-shift-V to copy/paste).

    I don’t have any suggestion for getting the behavior you’re asking for, but besides the normal ctrl-(shift)-C/V clipboard FYI you also have two other types of clipboard-like things: one which works anywhere (not only in the terminal) and is actually always automatically copying anything you select and lets you paste from it with middle click (this originated with X Windows but i think most Wayland compositors have also implemented it by now), and another which is found in GNU Readline (used by bash and numerous other REPLs) called the “kill buffer” which can be pasted (or “yanked”) from and cut (or “killed”) to using Emacs keyboard shortcuts (which also include various cursor movement controls).

    Notes:

    • the kill buffer is local to a given readline context, it’s not shared across different shell windows.
    • the list of emacs keybindings in that wikipedia article i linked is currently confusingly referring to the kill buffer as “the clipboard”
    • you can drastically reconfigure your readline keybindings and other behavior by editing your .inputrc file, but you cannot achieve what you were originally asking for because there is no concept of text selection in readline.

    HTH!