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Comment by matthavener | Hacker News Reader

I always hated having to copy/paste URLs from PuTTY, so I started using PuTTY Tray (http://haanstra.eu/putty/) It highlights URLs, reconnects on failure, and does a few other nice things

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What? How is copy/pasting hard in PuTTY?

Edit: After reviewing other comments, it appears people weren't aware that PuTTY has X11-style copy/pasting. It helps to read the docs, folks:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#f...

When it's the only thing on the OS that has X11 copy/pasting, that's the problem. It's like when people complain that a Linux program doesn't look like Linux, just like a bad Windows port.

Good luck Ctrl+C'ing in your terminal trying to copy that output.

Does putty support select, then right-click and click on Copy in the context menu? That is what I expect to work, and I've seen Unix ported apps that just ignore that, and have no Copy menu item either, so it's a complete mystery that selecting does anything.

This is pretty par for the course in the Windows world. There is no consistency, even within many single applications.

Aside from the various UI paradigms Microsoft has espoused over the years (eg. the 2003 sidebar, the 2007 ribbon, the 2010 tabbed ribbon), other vendors think they have their own intelligent concepts of how a UI should look.

It's just a damned good idea to RTFM, or at least skim it. I skimmed the PuTTY FAQ on day 1, many, many years ago.

Seems like if one couldn't figure out how to cut and paste in PuTTY, they'd check the docs.

I love that copy / paste method in putty. It drives me mad it doesn't work like that in the OS X terminal. Is there any way to get the OS X terminal to behave like Putty with copy and paste?

iTerm 2 has that feature. It's a very good Terminal replacement. The only complaint I've heard about it is that the rendering can be kinda slow if you're drinking from a firehose like dmesg.

Not that copy/paste is hard, its just much easier to click a link instead of highlighting it, switching to browser, new tab, paste

Me too, but on PuTTY Tray's download page:

"Last update: November 25th, 2007.

Please note: I have decided to stop development of the PuTTY Tray patch, and I have no plans to resume it at any point in the future."

Also a fan of PuTTY tray, but just like KiTTY, this 0.61 finally supports the windows 7 screen splitting and resizing shortcuts. That's too useful to pass up.

I hope the Tray guys will release an update incorporating these 0.61 changes.

I agree - copy and paste on putty drove me crazy enough to switch to a Mac for development work. "copy all to clipboard"?? I'll have to check out putty tray.

Copy and paste is the easiest thing in Putty! Just select anything and it is in your clipboard. To paste in Putty use Shift+Insert or just the right button of your mouse. So what are you talking about?

What? After all these years. Runs off to try it...god damn... all the time i've wasted i could have written a book.

I have to ask - how did you do it before?

go to the menu, copy all to clipboard. paste into notepad & copy the text i wanted. How stupid is that?

oh. my. god.

In my experience, people used to the famous IRC client mIRC do know how to copy&paste in PuTTy in a natural way. Those who didn't waste hours @ IRC back in the late 90's not :-)

Also, I get complaints of my coworkers because I configure SecureCRT to behave like PuTTy, they say it's dangerous :-/

You see? I could have written a book, or a trilogy.

I'm going to be that guy, but what the hell are y'all doing in putty that didn't lend itself to getting a proper posix environment to work out of. I tolerate Windows for my current Azure development, but beyond that... cygwin is my first install on any Windows machine, maybe after Chrome and Firefox.

I've long since decided that the best way to get a "proper POSIX environment" on a Windows machine is to install Debian in a VM-of-choice and connect to it with PuTTY.

Good luck installing Cygwin on an internet cafe.

(I used to use Putty to check my email using mutt remotely when on vacation).

Even so, the URL highlighter (making it clickable right from the window) is so indispensable, it makes not using PuTTY Tray a non-option. PuTTY needs this feature.

You can even customize that a little (Window > Selection).

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