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< Mice and keys

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~detritus

That's one thing I like about Emacs. The whole buffer of text is available for you to manipulate however you want; you can select and copy any portion of text therein. Unlike a terminal. Now with a terminal emulator you could use the pointer to select and copy text, a sub-optimal solution, mainly because, well, I would like to keep my hands on the keyboard at all times, and perhaps not always have I a mouse! Some of us like to stick to old-school virtual terminals, especially when we want to keep the noise of the web out!

tmux and screen I think allow you to navigate the buffer and idk, maybe they let you select text in it, I haven't really looked into that stuff. My own solution, the one I've wanted to adopt but I have never put myself to the task of it, is to have everything that would get printed to the screen saved and perhaps even parsed by default, so that I could select contents by referencing them through certain commands.... kind of like how the DOM works with websites. In fact, that's one of my um... "stashed" projects: a terminal based web browser that allows you to walk and selectively display parts of the document.

I should do that, oh I should. I've said it enough times already to know that should mostly means won't.

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~inquiry wrote:

> tmux and screen I think allow you to navigate the buffer
> and idk, maybe they let you select text in it, I haven't
> really looked into that stuff.

Copying text in tmux:

- <meta> [
- hjkl (or /? (search forward/back) the
  cursor where you want it
- <space> to mark copy starting point
- hjkl (or /? (search forward/back) the
  cursor where you want it
- <space> to copy from "copy starting
  point" to where cursor is at

then paste however you normally do that in your terminal.

Hopefully that's both accurate, and not too confusing.

> My own solution, the one I've wanted to adopt but I have
> never put myself to the task of it, is to have everything
> that would get printed to the screen saved and perhaps
> even parsed by default, so that I could select contents by
> referencing them through certain commands.... kind of like
> how the DOM works with websites. In fact, that's one of
> my um... "stashed" projects: a terminal based web browser
> that allows you to walk and selectively display parts of
> the document.

Sounds interesting, although since I almost always want to copy visible stuff, to me the context shift from what I can see to some perpetually-appended-to copy might incur a focus (the mind kind) penalty.

> I should do that, oh I should. I've said it enough times
> already to know that should mostly means won't.

I hear Murphy is hiring. ;-)