This is a hard problem for commandline applications unfortunately. Think about pasting text with Ctrl+V. Lots of existing commandline applications bind particular actions to Ctrl+V - should the terminal application always eat the Ctrl+V keypress to handle pasting?
This is why we added support to optionally set Ctrl+Shift+V as the paste keybinding in conhost.
Fortunately, the Windows Terminal doesn't have a lot of the legacy to maintain like conhost does, so it'll support setting paste to whatever keybinging you like :)
I don't even care about Ctrl+V. I just want the ability to right-click on selected text and bring up a menu with 'Copy', 'Paste', and maybe a few other operations on it.
No Windows terminal I've ever seen has the ability to do this.
Edit: Note that I haven't used the new terminal yet, so if it supports an actual right-click menu, than bravo!
Thanks for responding here! Really appreciate the interaction.
Pretty sure that this is one of the biggest requests / frustrations you will hear from users. The issue is that MS has normalized the right-click menu as the go-to method of choosing exactly what one wants to do with a selection of text (, or even anywhere, for that matter), and it's useful, and uniformly available in Office and other Windows apps, and missing ONLY in cmd.
For example, when pasting in Excel, Paste vs. Paste Special vs. Keep Formatting vs. Keep Formulas, etc; via the right-click menu is just great. Going from that to a "We insist on a 1982 MS-DOS experience" in the cmd window is just annoying.
I'm assuming that the main reason why the old terminal can't do this is because console apps can, in fact, handle right clicks. Far Manager is one example that does so for file selection, or alternatively to display its own (TUI) context menus.
The terminal still has the menu commands, by the way. They're tucked away in the window system menu (the one with Minimize, Close etc, that you can open by clicking on the app icon in the title bar - it's all under Edit there).
Hey me too! The number of times I've closed a terminal because "Close" and "Edit" are right next to each other. :(
I do prefer X because of the PRIMARY selection style automatic copy/pasting, but this would go a long way to making my Windows experience more enjoyable. The Windows development experience is hugely improved and my rediscoveries of it in the last few months have been generally very enjoyable.
Oh, you want an actual right-click menu? I honestly don't think I've ever heard that _specific_ request before.
You have never heard that people might want to use functionality that has worked on all editable text in the entire rest of the operating system since Windows 95?
No, people have not specifically made that request to our team in the last 4 years we've owned the console. We get feature requests all the time, but I certainly haven't heard this version before.
This fundamentally sums up why I prefer macOS over windows. Things work consistently throughout not only the desktop experience, but the phone and watch experience too.
I would prefer the X11 method of being able just to highlight the text and using middle mouse to to paste. Nice having two easily accessible copy & paste containers.
I've always hated middle-click paste. It's a nightmare waiting to happen.
I'm terrified that, when I'm scrolling, I'll accidentally push down just a little bit too hard on the scroll wheel, and it'll do something awful like paste PII into a chat or paste a passage of text into my terminal and one line of it gets parsed as a valid command.
I'd rather just use my middle button for autoscroll. It's safe, and it's my preferred way to scroll in the few applications that supported it.
I haven't used a mouse with overloaded middleclick/scroll for a long time. They feel like a bug.
To me it helps me not have to use the keyboard. Windows is a very hybrid keyboard/mouse driven environment (e.g. Alt-Tab is almost indispensible - but simply not how I think). Using the keyboard for things that are not typing is actually genuinely difficult.
Something like Gnome with the compromises their X-based history forces onto them basically means you can use the system without touching a keyboard except for typing, which is very nice. Alt-Tab and Ctrl-C/X/V are there, I think, but I've never used them.
I accidentally middle-click paste into terminals all the time while scrolling. I would love to just disable middle-click paste in Linux. Juggling two different clipboards with different behavior is terrible. If it were a good idea, some other product not encumbered by history would have adopted it by now.
>But you're probably a troll, because a real Linux user would actually make a useful complaint.
I thought it was clear enough that my complaint is that there's no button in any of the settings screens to disable middle-click paste. I've searched through the settings menus of both Ubuntu and Fedora. I've searched before for solutions, and I remember the solutions mostly looked like "here's a patch for GTK v2, you'll have to compile it yourself, replace your distro's packages for GTK, cut yourself off from updates, it won't work for programs that don't use GTK v2 specifically or your distro's packaged version of it, and you're never going to know if the random issues that happen later are because you compiled the wrong version of GTK or missed some distro-specific patches". I've done that sort of thing before, and it's pain. I don't have the mental bandwidth for that any more. I think it's more than fair for me to criticize a piece of software for not having a toggle exposed for a strange UI feature that's so easy to accidentally misuse.
It's been a while since I've looked harder than checking the settings menu for a solution to this, so I decided to search again, and found https://askubuntu.com/questions/4507/how-do-i-disable-middle.... All but one of the solutions are terrible. There's people suggesting compiling and replacing distro packages, there's people suggesting globally rebinding middle-click (some in ways that don't even persist), and there's even a suggestion for having a script run 24/7 which clears the clipboard out twice a second. There is a decent solution involving a gsettings command. The setting persists, which is great, though it only works with programs using GTK.
> I don't even care about Ctrl+V. I just want the ability to right-click on selected text and bring up a menu with 'Copy', 'Paste', and maybe a few other operations on it.
The existing windows terminal has supported that for ages.
Click the upper left icon of a terminal window
Properties->Options->Quick Edit Mode.
Uncheck.
It isn't 100% the same, after selecting text right clicking will auto copy it, but other than that, mostly the same.
It seems to be almost a secret (despite being right up there in the menubar), but VS Code has a great terminal tool built into it, which, until we get this new Windows Terminal in a few months, is by far the best terminal experience I've ever had on Windows. Another way MS really is trying to reduce developer friction...
It's not a hard problem. The problem is that the less common use case is being given the nicer UX. I use copy and paste 100x more often than the interrupt codes produced by CTRL+V/C. Put those interrupts in the context menu instead of copy/paste. If the use case needs to be inverted, make it a user preference.
Sometimes when I need ctrl+C, I really need ctrl+C right now. Being able to immediately cancel whatever stupidity I just typed is a very valuable thing.
Ctrl+C to interrupt was inherited from TOPS (via DOS and CP/M).
Ctrl+C to copy selected text was introduced on Xerox PARC, the granddaddy of all modern UIs. In DOS, some text-mode UI apps were already using it, although IBM CUA was more common.
Just do like vim and let users decide. Bind it to paste cuz you're windows and power users can modify a file in 2 sec. This isn't hard. This shouldn't be the issue it is.
