Gnome Terminal – Mouse Double Click Selection in Classic Mode

gnome-terminalmouse

I am running ubuntu 12.04.5 lts.
When I do a mouse double click selection I would like to select only a current word. For example in a line like:

/home/xx/asdf

right now the whole line gets selected when I doulble click on "xx". Also in a line like:

 $asdf=

I would like to select the 1st five characters – include $ in the selection. Right now it selects asdf= – 5 characters including the equal sign.

UPDATE:
The answer I accepted no longer works since Ubuntu 15 it seems.
The following answer works in Ubuntu18:

Double click selection in Gnome Terminal

Best Answer

For gnome-terminal:

In the menu bar, under Edit : Profile Preferences, tab General you will find Select-by-word chatacters. If you want the terminal to consider / to be a word boundary for selection purposes, remove / from the list of characters.

Related Solutions

Gnome Terminal – Double Click Selection Guide

How much is selected on double click can be configured via adding additional character classes to the default set. That means that adding a colon and other special characters that may show up in URLs leads to double click also selecting complete URLs.

This can be configured via the gnome config database. For that one has to get the id of the gnome shell profile. To get the default one:

puuid=$(gsettings get org.gnome.Terminal.ProfilesList default | tr -d "'")

Adding some URL related characters:

gsettings set \
org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Profile:/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$puuid/ \
    word-char-exceptions '@ms "-=&#:/.?@+~_%;"'

Note that:

@ms denotes the maybe-string gvariant type
the character class syntax matches the regex one, i.e. a-z specifies a range, where -az specified the literal 3 characters. Thus, I have explicitly put the - in the first position

History: In classic Gnome Terminal versions, the profile preference dialog contained a field for configuring those additional characters. With Gnome 3, UI experts have removed this option from the dialog because they thought it was too complicated to use, though. The default was also changed after Fedora 21.

Shell Terminal – Any Terminal Shell with Mouse Support?

zsh can be extended to support mouse operation like you describe, using Stéphane Chazelas’ mouse.zsh ZLE widget:

wget http://stchaz.free.fr/mouse.zsh
. ./mouse.zsh
zle-toggle-mouse

(and once you’ve tested it, add it to your ~/.zshrc).

It will work in any terminal with VT200 mouse tracking, and in the Linux console with gpm.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Gnome Terminal – Double Click Selection Guide

Shell Terminal – Any Terminal Shell with Mouse Support?

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