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Ask YC: Dragging text from OSX terminal windows?

3 points by pg ↗ HN
About 6 months ago I got a Macbook Air. It's an improvement over my old Powerbook in most respects, but not one: dragging text from terminal windows.

In older versions of OSX, it was very easy to highlight text in a terminal window and then click on it and drag it into another window. In more recent versions this doesn't work so well: the sw seems to have been tweaked to err on the side of interpreting the second click as changing the highlighted area, unless you pause and hold the cursor absolutely still for a bit before clicking. I usually work by dragging changed code into a repl, so this makes it much harder for me to program.

Does anyone know of any settings I can change in OSX to undo this "improvement?"

8 comments

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Hates_
Hmmm not sure. It works well for me on my iMac.
makecheck
I had thought this was just the behavior of Cocoa, and so any text field based on it will have the "pause, then drag".

There are Carbon-based terminals for Mac OS X that will drag text instantly. I'm partial to MacTelnet. :)

st3fan
MacTelnet is a joke right? It is worse then iTerm.
makecheck
No...it does what I need it to do.

Anything specific to back that up?

centuren
To be honest, I got lost with the concept of dragging text as a productivity tool. Why don't you stick with copy and paste for a while (combined with the convenient window switching keyboard short cut), and see if you end up taking the quotes away from "improvement".
pg
What is the convenient window switching keyboard shortcut?
damien
⌘tab to cycle apps

⌘` to cycle windows within an app

I think that's what he's referring to.

unalone
I just tested this with two Terminal windows running under OS 10.5.6. I didn't get the + icon indicating I could drag, but dragging still worked.

It helps if you lift your finger slightly as you click. It doesn't detract from the speed of the operation and makes it much more reliable.