Scroll-Wheel Copy and Paste

There is no standard ability to copy / cut / paste in the Terminal activity. There's a partial work-around if you have a USB mouse with a scroll-wheel which is also a third button (this setup is the norm).

If you have something in the paste buffer--for instance if you highlighted a command from a web page by highlighting it and copying with Ctrl-C--you can paste it to the command line.

Go to the Terminal, and click the scroll-wheel. It should paste what you have in the paste buffer. Remember that it will always paste it where the current cursor is, the mouse can't move the cursor in Terminal.

To copy something from Terminal, highlight the text. This effectively puts the highlighted text in a paste buffer. You can then paste it back into Terminal, or into another activity (such as Write or a web page text box) by clicking the scroll-wheel.

This is a poor substitute for proper copy-paste ability, but is very useful when trying to do complicated instructions at the command line.

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The following two methods are also very useful in order to paste into the Terminal window without the need for an external USB mouse (both methods work perfectly fine for pasting into Terminal, although I don't think they work for copying from the Terminal).

There's two different ways to paste into terminal without using extra hardware. The first is to create a script that does this. The second method is to remap the right touchpad button as the middle mouse button.

1st method (taken from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_the_Network#Copy_and_Paste_into_Terminal_Window

Open a terminal and create a new file called "paste" in the home directory. In the file enter the following

 #!/usr/bin/python
 import pygtk
 import gtk
 cb = gtk.clipboard_get(selection = "PRIMARY")
 print cb.wait_for_text()

Save then make the file executable by typing

 chmod a+x paste

Finally to run the script to paste from the clipboard type

 ./paste

The second method (taken from: http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/

In order to map the the middle mouse button onto the trackpad's right button, open Terminal and type:

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 3 2"

In order to restore the right trackpad button to default: xmodmap -e "pointer = default"

To make the change persist between reboots, go into root then create a file called ".xsession" in /home/olpc

Add the following to the file:

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 3 2"

In order to paste, simply press the right touchpad button.