Selecting a text for copying is a very unpleasant and frustrating experience

[Michal Predotka]

I was trying to copy a short output of a command.

At first when I was trying to select the text with my finger, I noticed my inputs history started to show up. I figured out it's caused by my finger moving up or down on the screen. I had no idea about this functionality before.

Later I tried "long-press". A pop up showed up with options: "Select", "Copy" and "Paste". I selected "Copy". Then after another "long-press" I selected "Paste" just to check what was actually copied (nothing was selected to copy before). The thing which was pasted was nothing from what was visible in the terminal window.

Then I tried "Select" option from the pop up menu. Due to no space on the left side between the text in Terminal and the window, I could not select anything moving my finger from left to right. The Dash was showing up instead. After a while I managed to select what I wanted. Then I noticed there's no way to copy that. I was trying to long-press on the selected text but nothing was happening. So I tapped on the "close" button visible on the screen. I assumed it was for closing the "selection mode".
Surprise, surprise, after that the familiar pop up with "Select", "Copy" and "Paste" showed up. And now I was able to copy what I selected before.

I believe the user experience could and should be much better for doing such simple task.

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

The whole copy/paste setup on the device in general is incomplete, so we had to come up with something specific to the terminal.

I don't think it's quite as painful as your rant suggests.

The current process is:-

Long press to activate select.
Drag to select some text
Close selection "dialog"
Copy.

We could possibly streamline this a bit.

* Grey out "copy" on long press until "select" has been done, so you don't hit that erroneously
* Change the "X" icon to a "copy" icon
* Pressing the "copy" button above implies copying to the clipboard, so do that.

That will omit some of the issues you have outlined.

However longer term the whole copy/paste on device is being re-worked, so this may all just go away.

[Evan McIntire (mcintire-evan)]

Even though it's not a bug per se, I figured it'd be a good idea to mark this as confirmed and wishlist importance

As of revision 171, copy no longer comes up unless some text is selected. As popey said awhile ago, we're gonna be figuring out how to rework the copy/paste system, but this should be a nice temporary fix :)

I might make a MP in a day or two that adds a copy button to the selection mode

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-terminal-dev/ubuntu-terminal-app/reboot/revision/171

[Michal Predotka (mpredotka)]

Thanks Evan! I remember trying to work with the code to find a way to fix it but I wasn't smart enough to figure out how Terminal handles copy/paste stuff.