Re: Copying text in screen is tedious

[Phil!Gregory]

* Pablo <address@hidden> [2004-05-04 16:30 +0530]:
> For Copying the text in screen, after pressing Ctrl-A, Ctrl-[, why is the
> cursor always stuck at the bottom right and we have to move it 25 columns
> above and then 80 coloumns left and then press Enter to start copying?

In my experience, the cursor always starts from wherever the cursor was
before you entered copy mode.  Many curses programs leave the cursor in
the lower right-hand corner by default, though (mutt, for example, does
this).

copy mode does have some keystrokes that make moving around a *lot*
easier.  The ones I use the most are:

  0 - move the cursor all the way to the left
  ^ - move the cursor to the first nonspace character
  $ - move the cursor to the last nonspace character

There doesn't appear to be any provision for jumping to the top of the
screen, but you can fake it with a repeated command.  If your screen is 24
rows tall, just type '2 3 <up arrow>' (or 'k' in place of the arrow if you
prefer vi-style movement) to go up 23 lines.

All of the movement and other copy mode keys can be found in the man page,
in the section for the 'copy' command.

> And if there is more than one page of text, in copy mode, why does one
> get a blank screen pressing Page-up or Page-down keys? How to copy text
> more than one page at a time?

These work for me.  There are a couple of possibilities in your case.  It
could be that PgUp and PgDn are sending different control codes than
screen is expecting (possibly, but unlikely).  Try using C-u and C-d
instead (that's control-u and control-d).  It could also be that the
program you're using isn't putting things into screen's scrollback
buffer.  Many fullscreen curses programs have this "feature".  What
program are you running?

-- 
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
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If you want to program in C, program in C.  It's a nice language.  I use
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                       -- Larry Wall
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