GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 120276
Wishlist: Support Rectangular Selection
Last modified: 2006-03-31 03:58:11 UTC
We are requesting that a feature be added that is used heavily on our thin clients. We are looking at moving our users to GNOME/XD2 and one feature that is missing in gnome-terminal/vte is the ability to do a "rectangular selection". In our current telnet client, you can shift click into the text area and grab only sections of the screen and those are put into the copy buffer and then can pasted into other applications. This works great for a situation where you have 3 columns of data, and only want to paste the first 2 columns.
Shift-click is already taken for use in selection, so if this were to be implemented, it would have to be done some other way. Not sure how this fits into selection in general, though.
If that is the case, maybe control-click or alt-click then. Our current telnet client creates a cross-hair when you enable this kind of selection and then as you move your mouse the selection area draws a box in reverse video. One reason for using this feature is that some software vendors use control codes to access special characters that draw boxes around certain sections of the screen. This allows you to not copy and paste those, and just crop out the text only. Thanks for consideration.
Ah, but Ctrl-Click is already used by gnome-terminal as a shortcut to the default dingus click action (typically "Open URL"). Alt-Click is used by most window managers to drag windows around. I'm not sure there are any modifiers left to work with here.
Nalin, the dingus click is shift+ctrl+click so ctrl+click is not taken by that action at least.
*** Bug 129631 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 61883 [details] [review] Patch to implement rectangle selection in vte.
This is a patch for this feature. When ctrl-click is pressed, selection changes to rectangle mode and back to default mode if it is released. Copying and pasting should work as expected too. Please, help me test this!
Tested here, seems to work great. I just did a few copies and pastes into gedit and I didn't encounter any problems. Applies against VTE head
I tested copy while scrolling and it seems ok there too. Any other ideas to test?
Very sweet. Thanks! 2006-03-30 Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@gnome.org> Bug 120276 – Wishlist: Support Rectangular Selection Patch from Pedro de Medeiros. * src/vte.c, src/vte-private.h: Implement block (rectangular) selection using ctrl+mouse.