GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 353610
Don't convert tab characters upon copying
Last modified: 2007-11-27 13:14:02 UTC
Now that we make a difference between space and empty (eg, echo " "), will be rad to also preserve tab characters. In selection and when copying. (xterm doesn't do this.)
*** Bug 498470 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
So I started attacking this. It's not trivial, because tab is supposed to change cursor position only and not overwrite the jumped area. However, before giving up, I thought maybe we can do something smart, that is, if the area is empty, try to preserve the tab. That's mostly possible and easy to do. The way I thought it can be easily done is to append one cell with the \t char and many columns, followed by "fragment" cells. This way, it would be nice as mouse selection will select all or none of the tab cells. There are technical issues though: - The tab character then is passed to renderer. Easy to fix by skipping nonprint chars. I considered marking it as invisible, but that would leak to the user because we give out attributes if asked for. (though the attribute struct is private, ouch!) - cell.attr.columns is only two bits and we have only one more bit left in cell.attr. So it can be expanded to three bits, which works for tabs up to 7 cells wide, but not the common eight :(.
Umm, ignore my comment about attributes. Public attributes are different from private attributes.
Ok, emptied two bits in the attr struct.
Ok, increased column bits to 4, added check for overflow to fallback to space tabs, and abused invisible attribute. Filed bug 499944 to fix that later. 2007-11-27 Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@gnome.org> Bug 353610 – Don't convert tab characters upon copying * src/vte-private.h: * src/vteseq.c (vte_sequence_handler_ta): Smart tab handling to try to preserve tab character upong copying. Also makes such smart tabs all-or-none selectable.
Yay! When will be seeing the effects of this in gnome-terminal?
According to roadmap, Dec 5 is next GNOME devel release. Expect it then. Note though that while it works great when you cat or diff to the terminal, it doesn't work with less or vim as those convert tab to spaces and terminal never sees the tabs. That's the best I could do anyway.
I expect problems to be fixed at the source, so I'd blame less/vim in those cases. :) My normal use case is {git,svn,} diff, which this will cover nicely.