Re: About Terminal on Buster
On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 05:21:28PM +0200, frantal@libero.it wrote:
> I installed a Debian 10 (32 bit) on an old PC desktop and I saw that the terminals (UX) doesn't have any menu above.
>
> How can I obtain a terminal window with menu above so that for example I can copy or paste commands etc.?
There are a *lot* of different terminal emulators. Pick the one you
like best. Some have menus, tabs, scrollbars... some don't. Some have
only classic 16-color mode, some have 256-color mode, etc. Some may
be configured by X resources, some may be configured by command-line
options, and so on.
Some of the most popular terminal emulators are xterm, rxvt-unicode,
gnome-terminal, konsole, lxterminal, terminator. There are more -- if
you want a full list, try "apt-cache showpkg x-terminal-emulator"
and look at the lines after "Reverse Provides:".
That said, the way one normally copies and pastes text does not involve
a menu. Standard X11 selection pasting works like this:
1) Move the mouse to the beginning of the text you would like to copy.
2) Hold the left button (button 1) down.
3) Drag the mouse to the end of the text you would like to copy.
4) Release button 1. Now the text is highlighted, and selected.
5) Move the mouse to the window into which you would like to paste the text
and acquire focus -- which may involve clicking, or not, depending on
your window manager.
6) Press the middle button (button 2) once to paste the selected text.
If your mouse lacks a middle button, it may have a scroll wheel. On such
mice, pressing the scroll wheel as if it were a button activates the
button 2 event. These are obnoxious as hell, though, because it's
really difficult to press the scroll wheel like a button without also
*turning* it, which may have other side effects depdending on the window
where you've got focus.
If your mouse has only two buttons and no scroll wheel, you may have to
enable an emulation mode that lets you emulate button 2 by pressing the
left and right buttons simultaneously. I don't know how to enable this
off the top of my head in modern Debian systems, because it's been decades
since I've seen such a mouse.
There are some alternatives to steps 1 through 4. For example, in many
terminal emulators, you can double-click or triple-click or even
quadruple-click a piece of text in order to select it. The effects vary
by terminal emulator and by where your mouse pointer is within a line
of text -- this may select a word, or a whole line, with the definition
of "word" being similarly fluid.
Contrariwise, applications that do not come from a Unix background (e.g.
major web browsers) may not have the same copy and paste selection
semantics. In some of these applications, after highlighting a piece
of text, you may have to press "Ctrl-C" to select it for pasting. (Don't
do this in a terminal, because Ctrl-C has a very different meaning
there!) Just be aware that this dichotomy exists.
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