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Selecting text in the Terminal app

By mr grieves, 26 October, 2022

Club AppleVis Member

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Can anyone describe how to efficiently select text in Terminal? This feels like a fairly basic thing, but so far my solution is to interact with the shell then use VO+Up and Down, then VO+Shift+C to copy last phrase to the clipboard. Which works up to a point but is a pain if there are multiple lines.

I'm sure there's an easier way??

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Edit menu

By PaulMartz

11 months 1 week ago

Member of the AppleVis Blog Team

According the the Edit menu, you can select all with Command+A, and select between marks with command+shift+A.

Through experimentation, I have found that if you VO+Up arrow to a random line of text, you can select that line with VO+shift+A, even without leaving any marks.

It's not at all clear to me how to leave marks, for example, to mark the beginning and end of a block of text that spans multiple lines, for example. It's rather confusing.

Personally, I use TDSR from github, but its text selection mechanism isn't much better.

Here is a solution I've been using for about 10 years.

By KE7ZUM

11 months 1 week ago

try: * vo shift up to find where you want to start the selection, * vo enter to start the selection, * vo down to place your curser on the last line you want to select, * vo enter to stop, * cmd c to copy.

Thanks

By mr grieves

11 months 1 week ago

Club AppleVis Member

I'll have a mess about with marks, thanks.
I've seen a lot on here about tdsr, although I can never remember its name. I did install it but wasn't immediately taken with it. I don't find the normal terminal too bad with VoiceOver, other than text selection. But I'll maybe check that out too if I can't get anywhere with marks.

I've been doing this since…

By KE7ZUM

11 months 1 week ago

I've been doing this since about 2012 or so, in fact, don't laugh, that is how I used to select text in pages in 2010 when I first started using a mac in 2010. I said, don't laugh. lol! I at the time didn't know better.

I think that does the trick!

By mr grieves

11 months 1 week ago

Club AppleVis Member

I've had a quick play about and that does seem to do the trick. I had no idea about VO+Enter. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts I think I know, there are always just as many I don't! :)

Thanks so much for the help.

Lol. any time. I read that…

By KE7ZUM

11 months 1 week ago

Lol. any time. I read that somewhere in help almost 13 years ago. lol! Goad it helped. It really is a cool way of selecting stuff.

Is it terminal only?

By mr grieves

11 months 1 week ago

Club AppleVis Member

Is it specific to terminal? I've been noticing today that caret browsing isn't working - the cursor keys in Safari, Edge and Chrome are all jumping about all over the place as if I have quick nav on. (I don't.). I thought I'd give VO+Enter a go there, but sadly it didn't seem to work

But I have been using it in Terminal and it's doing exactly what I was hoping for. It's going to be a huge time saver. Note to self: don't wait so long before posting on AppleVis!!

Vim can access the Mac OS clipboard as well

By Jason White

11 months 1 week ago

The version of Vim included in Mac OS can access the clipboard, using the usual "+" register. If you're running Vim as your text editor in the terminal, this functionality can be very useful.

For example, "+p will perform a paste operation. You can copy text from Vim to the clipboard easily, using various "yanking" commands.

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