Bash 4.4 bracketed-paste-mode stays on while running commands – corrupts paste

bashclipboardline-editor

I've been using bracketed paste in VIM which is excellent for ensuring pasted content gets into the editor un-modified without triggering actions (such as auto formatting, and auto closing parenthesis).

I've built and installed the latest bash 4.4, and enabled bracketed-paste-mode via ~/.inputrc.

It technically works perfectly, when pasting into the command-line, but it remains active after pressing enter. So if I type cat <enter> for example, and attempt to paste to a file, the file contains the paste-begin and paste-end markers.

Can BASH 4.4 be configure to enable bracketed paste mode ONLY while at the prompt?

Best Answer

My apologies for answering my own question, but the answer in my case was not what I expected.

.. anyhow ..

My issue turned out to be gnu-screen. The problem was essentially that I was manually entering bracketed paste mode by sending '\<ESC>P\<ESC>[?2004h\<ESC>\' which is the bracketed paste code wrapped in a screen pass-through escape sequence.

I eventually took the screen source files, and merge in a feature branch which added full bracketed paste support. Once I did that, not only did it work, but screen now tracked the bracketed paste state, turning it on/off as I switched panes.

This was important because I had used the same technique for telling VIM to use bracketed paste, which also backfired. Once I had bash-4.4 bracketed paste and vim-8 bracketed paste working normally, running them under the newly patched gnu screen was a pure pleasure.

I haven't tried TMUX. After using screen since the late 80's, switching to tmux seems like hard work, though I've been planning on doing just that for at least the last two years now :-)

Again, bash-4.4 bracketed paste works perfectly, vim-8 bracketed paste works perfectly, I just forgot to mention I glued them together with gnu screen, using the default ubuntu packages which are based on old source.

Related Solutions

Copy / paste text selections between tmux and the clipboard

Use the following tmux.conf with copy-pipe in the new versions of tmux (1.8+):

set -g mouse on
# To copy:
bind-key -n -t emacs-copy M-w copy-pipe "xclip -i -sel p -f | xclip -i -sel c "

# To paste:
bind-key -n C-y run "xclip -o | tmux load-buffer - ; tmux paste-buffer"

prefix+[ into copy-mode
select content with mouse(hold)
M-w to copy that part into system clipboard
C-y the paste it inside tmux, C-v to paste it inside other regular application like web browser.

PuTTY – Pasting Text with Tabs into a Here-Document

When you type into a shell, the shell recognizes some characters as commands. For example, the carriage return character (the character sent by the Enter key) causes the shell to execute the command. The tab character causes the shell to perform completion. When you paste something into the PuTTY terminal window, from the shell's point of view, that's the same thing as if you'd typed these characters. So at the point the tab character is pasted, the shell performs completion, it doesn't insert a tab.

The easiest way to copy a file without it being transformed would be to use PuTTY's companion program PSCP or PSFTP to copy the file. This is the simplest way conceptually, but it does have the overhead of running another program, authenticating, choosing a directory, etc.

If you want something inline, you can paste directly into cat, rather than in a here document. Then you'd be pasting into the terminal's line editor, not into the shell's line editor. As the terminal's line editor is very primitive, only a few control characters have a special meaning there, not including tab. Press Ctrl+D at the beginning of a line to terminate the input.

[darkstar /]$ cat >text.txt
Paste
Ctrl+D
[darkstar /]$

I you want to transfer arbitrary data over a medium that interprets control characters, you can encode it into a form that uses only “tame” characters. Base64 is one; it doesn't use any control character and ignores whitespace and newlines. GNU coreutils, which is part of the basic installation on Linux and Cygwin, includes a base64 command. On the sender side, run base64 <file-to-decode, e.g.

On Windows: run base64 c:/path/to/test.txt from a Cygwin terminal
Copy the output.
In the shell in the PuTTY window, type `base64 -d >/tmp/test.txt and press Enter.
Paste the output from base64.
Press Ctrl+D.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Copy / paste text selections between tmux and the clipboard

PuTTY – Pasting Text with Tabs into a Here-Document

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