On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 12:16:00PM +1000, Charlie wrote: > Cannot recall what version of Debian stopped copying text in xterm by > Ctrl + C or Shift + Ctrl + C So don't know how to copy from xterm
xterm is a terminal emulator. Pressing Ctrl-C in a terminal emulator simply passes a byte (0x03) to the application running inside the terminal, which is usually a shell. But they're interpreted by the terminal driver layer first. The stty command allows you to see or change the bindings of control characters by the terminal driver. Ctrl-C is usually bound to the 'intr' facility in the terminal driver. Pressing it in a terminal sends the interrupt signal (SIGINT) to all running foreground processes. It does not copy text. That's a Windows thing, and you are not in Windows. > Unable to paste from xterm into a text editor using Ctrl + V or Shift > + Ctrl + V Pressing Ctrl-V in a terminal emulator sends a byte (0x16) to the application. At the terminal driver layer, Ctrl-V is usually bound to the 'lnext' facility (literal next). It's like an escape sequence for keys. The next key you press *after* Ctrl-V will lose its special meaning, and will just be passed along verbatim. For example, if you press Ctrl-V Ctrl-C, it won't interrupt foreground processes. Instead, it will simply pass the literal 0x03 byte to the application. It becomes data. hobbit:~$ printf ^C | hd 00000000 03 |.| 00000001 The ^C there is where I pressed Ctrl-V Ctrl-C. Now, all of that is just background information. What you wanted to know, I guess, is "how to copy text between terminals". The first step is to highlight the text with the left mouse button. Drag the mouse over the text while holding the left button. This creates a "selection" containing the text you've selected. Next, click on the window that you want to paste the text *into*. You need this window to have "focus". Depending on your window manager, clicking may not actually be needed. Some WMs use "focus follows mouse", which means the mouse pointer simply has to be inside the window. Others use "click to focus" which means you have to click. Once you've focused on the receiving window, press the middle mouse button to paste the selection into the second window. (X11 uses three-button mice. Everything is designed around this.) If your mouse is too new or too Microsoft-tainted to have three buttons, then things get tricky. If your mouse is literally an old PS/2 style two-button mouse from the 1980s, you might be in real trouble. There are hacks to try to mimic the middle button in other ways, but you'll have to read documentation to learn how to invoke them. Let's assume that's not the case. If your mouse has two buttons plus a scroll wheel, you might be able to press the scroll wheel to act as the middle button. Doing this without also *turning* the scroll wheel takes practice. It can be done, at least sometimes. So, that's how you copy and paste text between windows in X11. You select with the left button, and paste with the middle button. Obviously the world can't be that simple. While X11 was developing this interface around three-button mice, Microsoft was building a different interface around two-button mice. In the Microsoft paradigm, you copy by highlighting the text you want to copy, and then performing a second step. That step might be right-clicking a menu and selecting "Copy". Or it might be pressing Ctrl-C (but not in a terminal emulator). Once you've performed this copy operation, the text is in a "clipboard", which is separate from the "selection". Pasting text from the clipboard into a new window under the Microsoft paradigm is done by pressing Shift-Insert. (Or by right-clicking a menu and selecting Paste, or by pressing Ctrl-V in some programs, but not in terminal emulators.) Some programs that you run on Debian may use the Windows paradigm and put data into the clipboard instead of the selection. For those things, you can try Shift-Insert instead of the middle button. It's just another thing you might need to know/use. Good luck.
