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As a long time putty user, i love how upon selecting a text it gets copied into the buffer and upon right clicking it gets pasted back in.

Is there a way to configure Terminal to behave the same way?

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2 Answers

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Terminal is limited in its configurability but iTerm2 is a Terminal replacement that does what you ask and more. Including bookmarks for ssh sessions not unlike puTTY.

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Looks interesting. How to you set cut and paste up as i described though? I don't see this under Preferences – Jam May 15 '11 at 0:18
Preferences windows -> General tab. Make sure Copy to clipboard on selection is checked under the Mouse section. – Ian C.♦ May 15 '11 at 0:31
iTerm is the best. +1 – hobs May 15 '11 at 0:50
@Ian That will copy to the clipboard when text is hilighted, but won't paste on a right click. It brings up the context menu. It doesn't look like there is an option to do this, but it seems useful. – KeithB May 15 '11 at 14:04
@KeithB: What's a "right click"? :) But seriously, there's an option to make the middle button paste from clipboard. It's just down from the copy-on-select option. – Ian C.♦ May 15 '11 at 19:16
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If you have a three-button mouse (e.g., the Apple Mighty Mouse with scroll ball, the ball can also act as a third button), Terminal will paste the current selection if you middle-click (just like X11 and xterm).

However, it doesn't actually Copy the selected text at the time you select it. Middle-click just performs the Edit > Paste Selection command. Which, by the way, you can invoke with Shift-Command-V.

Also—and I use this most of the time, to avoid changing the contents of the clipboard—you can simply drag the selected text then drop it to paste it. You can of course drag to other terminal windows (or other applications), but you can also just drag a few pixels and then release to Paste into the current terminal.

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