Copy & Paste between terminal(s) and application windows in i3

Question

I have recently installed the i3 tiling window manager [1] on my Ubuntu system and I'm trying to figure out how to copy & paste between various terminal and application windows.

How can this be done?

[1] http://i3wm.org

Answer 1

Some terminals use CTRL+SHIFT+C and CTRL+SHIFT+V to copy and paste, while others use CTRL+ALT+C and CTRL+ALT+V, like urxvt (See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rxvt-unicode#Cut_and_paste ).

For i3wm, try using a clipboard manager, like clipit.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clipit

Add exec --no-startup-id clipit to ~/.i3/config to start it automatically.

Answer 2

I have just had success using the middle mouse button with xterm in i3 to copy from a remote terminal to firefox. Use the middle mouse button to copy and paste.

Answer 3

You have had good answers above, I will just add a detail. As a default, the clipboard of each container is emptied when the container is closed. So if you copy some text from a terminal, close the terminal, and paste the text in another terminal - it will not work, because the clipboard will have been emptied in the meanwhile.

Answer 4

I installed xfce4-terminal which pretty much does exactly what I need.

sudo apt-get install xfce4-terminal

Answer 5

I just got mine done by holding down Ctrl+mouse wheel. Then selecting from the popup that comes the option: Select to clipboard by moving the mouse to that option and releasing the mouse wheel. Then I went ahead and selected the text I wanted to copy in the terminal and it worked.

This was done in i3 wm

Answer 6

I don't use that myself, but your copy buffer might be accessible through ctrl +shift+c to copy and v to paste. These is also programs like xclipboard for capturing output of terminal commands into a clipboard. Try it out, report back!