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Selection and safe paste

Drag, double-click for a word, triple-click for a line, Alt (Option) to select a block, and past the edge to scroll. On Linux a selection is the PRIMARY selection. A paste with a line break shows you what it will run first.

• Select by dragging, a word by double-clicking, a line by triple-clicking. What is highlighted is exactly what copying gives, and a selection stays on its text as output arrives. Typing does not clear it; it goes when the text under it changes.
• Past the edge. Drag above or below the pane and the scrollback scrolls while the selection grows, faster the further out, even with the pointer held still.
• Blocks. Alt+drag (Option+drag on macOS, Ctrl+Alt+drag where the window manager takes Alt) selects the same columns on every row, copied a row per line.
• Copy on select, off by default, under Settings → Terminal → Input.
• PRIMARY on Linux. Every selection is also the PRIMARY selection, and middle-click pastes it, through wl-paste/wl-copy or xclip/xsel. Without them, and on macOS and Windows, middle-click pastes the clipboard.
• Copy and paste with Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+C and Cmd+V on macOS), so plain Ctrl+C is still SIGINT. Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert work as on any Linux terminal.
• A paste with a line break asks first, showing the text, since at a prompt each line runs the moment it lands. Paste is the default button, and Settings → Terminal → Input turns the question off. Pasted text is sanitized: escape and other control characters are stripped, so a clipboard cannot close a bracketed paste early.
• Shift bypasses mouse reporting, the xterm convention, which is how you copy text out of htop. Shift+right-click opens the menu inside such a program.

See Selection and the mouse.