How to copy multi-page text from the terminal into the clipboard

clipboardcopy/pastelessman

I was viewing a man page for a software on my machine and I needed to copy-paste some of that text but the text was much more than one page. I'm aware I can direct the output to a file and use UI based software such as gedit to copy the text I need. But can this be done from the terminal ?

Joseph suggested a command line method (Little bit complicated to me, I'm not yet good with regular expressions on Linux). But I'm wondering if there is a way to do so while I'm still on the terminal, using the mouse.

I hope I get a generic answer, however, I'm using Ubuntu.

Best Answer

I have a couple of imperfect, but maybe useful, ideas.

Method 1 - mousey.

Use the terminal scrollbar.

Details (assuming xterm; adjustments will be required for other terminals.)

Enable the scrollbar if it isn't already. (In xterm, it's in the menu you get with Ctrl+Button2.)
Make sure less is not running with the -c option (I have this option enabled in my LESS environment variable, but it interferes with what we're about to do, so I have to type -c to turn it off.)
Using whatever less commands you like, scroll up or down so the first line you want to copy is visible on the screen.
triple-Button1 your chosen starting line to select it.
Scroll down until the last line you want to copy is visible on the screen. You must use only the space bar or other simple scrolling keys, not a / search - the point here is to get less to send all the lines to the terminal so they can be copied.
Button3 on your chosen end line to extend the selection.

Possible difficulty: your scrollback buffer may not be big enough. That can be changed in xterm with the saveLines resource or -sl command line option, but I don't know of a way to change it in an xterm that's already running.

Method 2 - non-mousey.

Use the | (pipe) command in less to send the text to xclip.

Details:

Using whatever less commands you like, scroll up or down to position the last line you want to copy at the top of the screen. You can skip this step and the next step if you want to copy all the way to the end.
Use the m (mark) command to set a mark at your chosen end position. Marks are a useful feature by themselves, and you should know them already from vi, but just in case you don't: mx sets a mark, where the x can be any letter, and 'x returns you there later.
Now scroll up so the first line you want to copy is at the top of the screen.
Use the pipe command: |x which will bring up a prompt for you to enter an external command. The x should be the same mark letter you used in the m command, or $ for "all the way to the end". Type xclip there.

The simple case of copying the entire man page reduces to g|$xclipEnter.

Warning (i.e. the horrible thing that just happened to me): xclip will be semi-backgrounded, running as part of the less process group. If you try to suspend less, start another job on the same terminal, and paste into it, it will not work. Then when you later foreground the man/less job, suddenly the paste will come through. I think this should be considered an xclip bug...

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.

Copy markdown input to the clipboard as rich text

As it turns out, the link in the question hinted at a working solution in the form of xclip:

pandoc -S file.mkd | xclip -t text/html

...and then I can paste it straight into the document in libreoffice, properly formatted. This works with the versions of the programs in the Ubuntu 13.04 repositories (pandoc 1.10.1 and xclip 0.12) -- the -t option for xclip especially is only in version 0.12 or above. The -S option of pandoc makes it produce 'typographically correct output', so -- is turned into an en-dash, --- is turned into an em-dash, and a few other things.

If you want to use the ctrl-v clipboard, use:

pandoc -S file.mkd | xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard

Edit: if you're running OS X (with pbcopy rather than xclip), use:

pandoc -S file.mkd | textutil -stdin -format html -convert rtf -stdout | pbcopy

To transform selected text without creating a file, you can use:

xclip -o | pandoc -S | xclip -t text/html

...this can, of course, be mapped to a keyboard shortcut.

This can work well with a number of text markup formats as input, see the pandoc guide for some more information on how to accomplish this (you might need to use the -f/--from/-r/--read option, especially if you're using the xclip|pandoc|xclip version).

As a side note, you can also read an already-existing HTML file into xclip:

xclip -t text/html <file.html

<file.html xclip -t text/html