selection
Hurricane Electric Internet Services
NAME
selection - the cut and paste utility for Linux virtual
consoles
SYNTAX
selection [-a accel] [-b baud-rate] [-c l|m|r] [-d delta]
[-m mouse-device] [-p l|m|r] [-s sample-rate] [-t mouse-
type] [-r slack]
DESCRIPTION
selection is a utility that allows characters to be
selected from the current Linux virtual console using the
mouse and pasted into the current console. selection is
normally invoked at boot time from /etc/rc.local, and runs
as a background process.
OPTIONS
-aaccel
movements of more than delta pixels are multiplied
by accel (default 2)
-bbaud-rate
set the baud rate of the mouse (default 1200 baud)
-cl|m|r
set the copy button to be the left, middle or right
button (default left)
-ddelta
movements of more than delta pixels are multiplied
by accel (default 25)
-mmouse-device
specify the mouse device (default /dev/mouse)
-pl|m|r
set the paste button to be the left, middle or
right button (default right)
-ssample-rate
set the sample rate of the mouse (default 100)
-tmouse-type
specify the mouse type (Microsoft = `ms', Mouse
Systems Corp = `msc', MM Series = `mm', Logitech =
`logi', BusMouse = `bm', MSC 3-bytes = `sun', PS/2
= `ps2'; default = ms)
-wslack
turn on wrap-around, specifying the amount of slack
before the pointer reappears at the other side of
the screen (default off)
OPERATION
To invoke the selection mechanism, press and release the
copy button (the meaning of the buttons may be set at
startup as above). A highlighted block will start moving
around the screen, correlated with the movement of the
mouse.
Move the block to the first character of the selection,
then press and hold down the copy button.
Drag out the selection; the selected text will be high-
lighted. Then release the copy button. You can take the
end of the selection to before the start of the selection
if necessary.
Double-clicking the copy button while the highlighted
block is on the screen selects text by word boundaries;
treble-clicking selects by entire lines. If the button is
held down after double- or treble-clicking, multiple words
or lines may be selected. A word consists of a set of
alphanumeric characters and underscores.
If a trailing space after the contents of a line is high-
lighted, and if there is no other text on the remainder of
the line, the rest of the line will be selected automati-
cally. If a number of lines are selected, highlighted
trailing spaces on each line will be removed from the
selection buffer.
Pressing the paste button in any virtual console pastes
the selected text into the read queue of the associated
tty.
Any output on the virtual console holding the selection
will clear the highlighted selection from the screen, to
maintain integrity of the display, although the contents
of the paste buffer will be unaffected.
The selection mechanism is disabled if the controlling
virtual console is placed in graphics mode, for example
when running X11, and is re-enabled when text mode is
resumed. (But see BUGS section below.)
FILES
/dev/mouse - default mouse device
/dev/console - current VC device
DIAGNOSTICS
selection complains if any of the devices it requires can-
not be located.
BUGS
The size of the paste buffer is set at 2048 bytes by
default. This may be changed at compile time; consult the
installation notes.
The selection mechanism doesn't work very well with graph-
ics characters, or indeed with any characters where a map-
ping between the typed character and the displayed charac-
ter is performed by the console driver. The selection
mechanism pastes into the input buffer the character codes
as they are displayed on the screen, not those originally
typed in by the user.
Because of the way that the kernel bus mouse drivers work,
allowing only one process to have the mouse device open at
once, selection cannot co-exist with X11 using ATI XL,
Logitech and Microsoft bus mice or with a PS/2 mouse. The
X server will not start while selection is running. This
problem is not present with serial mice.
AUTHOR
Andrew Haylett <ajh@gec-mrc.co.uk>
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lefty patches originally suggested by:
Sotiris C. Vassilopoulos <scv2f@edu.Virginia.acc.honi4>
Logitech patches from:
Jim Winstead Jr <jwinstea@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Command line options based on those from:
Peter Macdonald <pmacdona@sanjuan>
Patches for bus mouse from:
Erik Troan <ewtroan@eos.ncsu.edu>
Christoph Niemann <niemann@rubdv15.etdv.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
Koen Gadeyne <kmg@barco.be>
Patches for PS/2 mouse from:
Hans D. Fink
Patches for Sun mouse from:
Michael Haardt <michael@gandalf.moria>
Run-time configurable mouse buttons suggested by:
Charlie Brady <charlieb@au.oz.tpl.tplrd>
Setsid patches by:
Rick Sladkey <jrs@world.std.com>
Apologies to any contributors whose names I have omitted.
Hurricane Electric Internet Services
Copyright (C) 1998
Hurricane Electric.
All Rights Reserved.