Hotkey/menu to select-all and copy text in the Windows Terminal App
How do I quickly select-all text using a hotkey or a menu in the new Windows Terminal App in Windows 10?
In the Command Prompt or in PowerShell I can right-click on the top of the window and select the menu "Copy All". In the former I can also use [CTRL]+A, but none of these work in the newer Windows Terminal App.
The feature of select-all via Ctrl+A is arriving soon also in Windows Terminal.
This feature was opened in the post Ability to select/copy all the text in the session #1469 and was assigned to the developer Carlos Zamora.
The developer documented his work in
Scenario: Keyboard Text Selection #4993.
The last entry in this post says:
@cinnamon-msft - cinnamon-msft modified the milestones: Terminal v1.x, Terminal v2.0 Sep 29, 2020
As the last release of Windows Terminal today is v1.3.2651.0 from Sep 22, 2020, this feature might arrive in the next release of Windows Terminal.
I did it! Go to the top of the terminal tab/tile of your target the document. Press ctrl + shift paint some text, go with the mouse to the scroll bar (do not release ctrl + shift), move to the desired bottom. Then click/paint with the mouse and you will be selecting from the desired begining to the desired end. Then press "c" (now you will see the selection is not selected any more and you can release ctrl and shift) the text is now in the clipboard for pasting where you need. While writing this I selected/paste more than 18K lines in a single operation. Obviously the escape sequence that gave color the my text is not there for being copied.
I know I'm late to the party, but here's what I do. It uses your mouse but does not require dragging the mouse to select the text. It is actually very fast.
- First, highlight some text at the beginning of the block you want to copy. It can even be the first character or word all by itself.
- Next, scroll in whatever way is fastest for you to the end of the block you want to copy. You do not need to hold down anything - not a mouse button, a key, or anything else. To the OP's specific question, if I want to copy everything in Terminal, I grab the thumb in the scroll bar and drag it to the end of the block I want to copy. This usually takes about one second or less.
- Find the end of the block of text you want to copy. Now you want to hold down the Shift key. With the Shift key held down, click the last character of the block of text you want to copy. At this point, you should be able to see that the entire block of text is selected.
- Copy as you normally would, using Ctrl-C, or Right-Click/Copy, or whatever works best for you.
- Profit.