Scroll-Wheel Copy and Paste

There is no standard ability to copy / cut / paste in the Terminal activity, but there are several ways to achieve this functionality. This page has instructions for using the middle button (usually the scroll-wheel) of a mouse. An alternative is to create a "paste" script.

External USB mouse

This requires a USB mouse with a scroll-wheel which is also a third button (common setup). It works for both pasting and copying.

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.

Middle button on touchpad

You can remap the right touchpad button to partly act as if it were the middle button of a mouse. This works for pasting, but not for copying.

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.