multiline

It’s SO scary when you paste a bunch of commands by accident and then it runs them all.

fish, zsh, and newer bash versions protect you from this: you have to press Enter before running the thing you pasted. This is called “bracketed paste”

problem: copying with the mouse can go wrong

• copying 400 lines of text by dragging is nobody’s idea of a good time
• sometimes extra whitespace that you didn’t want gets added at the end of lines

panel 3

smiling stick figure with short curly hair: “copying a LOT of text is way easier if you don’t use the mouse! Here are 2 tricks for copying without the mouse. “

copy trick 1: pbcopy

macOS comes with two programs that can copy from stdin / paste to stdout, like this:

cat main.go | pbcopy

They’re SO useful and on Linux I like to write my own versions of pbcopy/pbpaste using xsel or xclip

pbcopy over SSH

you can even implement pbcopy over SSH (yes really!) with this bash one-liner.

It uses an escape code called “OSC 52”.

printf "\033]52;c;%s\007" 
       "$(base64 | tr -d '\n')"

copy trick 2: syncing the vim clipboard

I use vim as a terminal text editor, and I find it’s WAY easier if I sync my system clipboard with the vim clipboard like this:

set clipboard=unnamed

tmux can also copy to your system clipboard.