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In Red Hat, if there is a path somewhere on my terminal window and I triple click it, the whole path is selected. I can then easily copy it using middle-click or a regular copy-paste.

This doesn't seem to work in Terminal.app, i.e. triple click selects the whole line which is most of the time useless.

Is there a way to change this behavior? Should I look into other terminal apps like iTerm?

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    Looks like this work in iTerm.app. Nice ! Any tip for Terminal.app?
    – FrenchKheldar
    Dec 21, 2011 at 0:10

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The shortcut for Terminal.app is ⌘+⇧+doubleclick.

You might also be interested in the following shortcuts:

  • ⌘+K to clear the screen
  • ctrl+U to delete everything to the left of the cursor
  • ctrl+K to delete everything to the right of the cursor
  • ctrl+A to jump to the left end
  • ctrl+E to jump to the right end
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  • In Lion, it's ⌘+doubleclick, but it opens Safari not copy the selected URL to the clipboard.
    – lhf
    Jun 25, 2012 at 22:55
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    ⌘+K clears all saved lines. To clear the screen, use control+L.
    – lhf
    Jun 25, 2012 at 23:00
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    @lhf I don't know what you mean. ⌘+doubleclick seems to do nothing in 10.7.4 for me. To select a path only ⌘+SHIFT+doubleclick works for me.
    – gentmatt
    Jun 26, 2012 at 5:31
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    @lhf, ⌘-Double-Click opens URLs (and man-page references, and email addresses). Add the Shift modifier to perform selection without attempting to open URLs. NOTE: You must not already have text selected, otherwise it will treat it as “add/remove discontiguous words to/from the selection” (for comparison, try Command-Clicking and -Dragging to add discontiguous text to the selection).
    – Chris Page
    Jun 27, 2012 at 5:07
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    Prior to Mac OS X Lion 10.7, ⌘-Double-Click merely added/removed a word to/from the selection (Double-Click selects words, Command-Click adds/removes noncontiguous text to the selection) and ⌘-Shift-Double-Click would either select a path or open a URL, depending on what you clicked on. In Lion and later, ⌘-Shift-Double-Click always means "select a path or URL" and ⌘-Double-Click means "open the URL, if there is one and there isn't any other text selected".
    – Chris Page
    Jun 29, 2012 at 13:32
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Although this doesn't answer your question directly, a better terminal program is probably iTerm2. This does allow for this kind of selection, even nicer, double clicking also automatically copies it to the clipboard as well!

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  • Thanks @romeovs! I made the initial post on the iPhone, where there seems to be no way to get to the editing help.
    – Paul Wagland
    Dec 23, 2011 at 8:29
  • iTerm2 is way better than Terminal.app. Having a process list with Kill-Button is priceless. No more Ctrl-C.
    – bot47
    Jun 27, 2012 at 6:56

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