Terminal – How to Double Click Text Selection in iTerm

Here's what happened. On the machines I was trying to reach (10.x.y.182 and 10.x.y.194), in the time when I was not using them they had their hard disks replaced and the OS reinstalled. This gave them new SSH keys, invalidating the ones I had in my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Unfortunately, Terminal.app did not surface this problem to me.

By deleting the entries for those machines in ~/.ssh/known_hosts, I forced the system to pull down the new keys and ask me if I wanted to use them. With this done, connections worked perfectly as usual. Oddly, however, even before I changed ~/.ssh/known_hosts, connections using the DNS name of the machine (svr10 and svr20) worked. Weird.

Thanks, everyone, who looked at this problem.

I was wondering "How Hard Can It Be(c)" to implement it and gave it a go today.

The Terminal.app seems to emulate 'move cursor to left/right' ESC sequences. You'll hear the famous 'beep' if you try to place the cursor in the shell prompt. And you'll hear it as many times as there are invalid moves.

The solution in iTerm2 works the same by invoking the appropriate ESC sequences. Although it beeps only once if you try to place the cursor in an invalid area ;)

Terminal.app seems not to be able to handle multi-line prompts, only moving on the last line seems to work. Multi-line prompts in this implementation should be handled correct.

Results can be found on github. It's a fork of the original with a pending pull request. The branch I work on is named 'option-click-hardcoded'.

And of course it's highly untested. That means tested only by me on my late-2007 MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7.3.

If you'd like try it out by compiling it yourself or download the precompiled binary for i386/x86_64/ppc iTerm_v1.0.0.git-085ec22c.zip).