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Terminal has this standard linux X window behavior. Is there anyway (including non-free utilities) to get this feature universally in macOS Ventura?

Neuromancer
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1 Answers1

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Terminal has this standard linux X window behavior.

Your conceptualization of how this works is reasonable, but there’s a disconnect with how this actually works and is structured.

Terminal does not have “standard Linux X Window behavior.” Terminal is exactly what it’s name states: a terminal emulator. It just so happens to have mouse support like many other terminal emulators out there. There’s a lot in that one line to unpack.

There’s a few points that should be clarified:

  • macOS ≠ Linux. macOS is a certified Unix. Linux is “unix like.”
  • X-Windows or X is not a Linux product, but a Desktop Environment produced by Xorg. It’s available for virtually every OS from AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, the unending variants of Linux, Solaris and of course, macOS.
  • macOS uses Aqua which is definitely not X

Basically, none of this has anything to do with the GUI.

Now the points related to the mouse and clipboard…

  • mouse support on the terminal (not the app) is handled by a daemon (moused) running on the host/server that detects the mouse and processes the events which it reports back to the Terminal. See Apple’s document: Turn on Mouse Reporting in Terminal on Mac. The terminal is what takes the event like “middle button click” and does something with it.
  • The action, in this case, copy selected text and paste is a function of the terminal interpreting those events
  • The OS doesn’t have a clipboard. That is a function of the GUI (Aqua, X, Wayland, etc.) and terminal emulator (Terminal, iTerm, etc.). An emulator can have it’s own clipboard or use the one provide by the GUI or they could use both.

The bottom line is that the terminal and GUI are two distinct environments into the OS. Terminal (the app) is just a window into the CLI of the OS; it’s just a software version of the old hardware terminals of yore. Unfortunately, you can’t take an action based on one environment (the CLI) and just make it universally available in another.

All of that said (my intention was to get you on the right page so to speak), this existing answer has several methods to implement this function.

Allan
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