command line
I'm looking for a way to select, copy and paste the text in the terminal completely without the mouse.
I've been using tmux until now, but I find its key combinations a bit complex for everyday use of copy & paste, and I'm now looking for alternatives.
Do you guys have any suggestions?
To be clear, this is not about piping to the clipboard but about selecting the text as it's possible in e.g. tmux!
I am using xsel Install xsel, but I am only using it with plain text and unicode text.
xsel can copy and paste to three different "clipboards".
By default, it uses the X Window System primary selection, which is basically whatever is currently in selection. The X Window System also has a secondary selection (which isn't used much), and a clipboard selection. You're probably looking for the clipboard selection, since that's what the desktop environment (e.g. Gnome, KDE, XFCE) uses for its clipboard. To use that with xsel:
xsel --clipboard < new-clipboard-contents.txt
xsel --clipboard > current-clipboard-contents.txt
GNOME Terminal has the above functionalities.
In case you didn't know, in most terminal emulators:
Simple, GTK+ pop-up terminal - https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda
GTK+ popup terminal. Great multi-monitor support. - https://github.com/Guake/guake
Check out Yakuake for a Qt/KDE alternative.
Feature rich terminal using the EFL toolkit. https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology
Best Answer
Consider
xclip, which is a command-line interface to the X clipboard, and is available withsudo apt-get install xclip.You may have noticed that in Ubuntu, if you select some text and then press the middle mouse button, that text will get pasted into whatever input is in focus.
xcliphooks right into that, so if you runseq 10 | xclip -ithen middle-mouse somewhere, you'll paste the numbers 1 to 10. If you were to select my username then runxclip -o | cowsay, you'll get a cow saying the word "ymbirtt".