Vscode: Add a copy on select option for the terminal

[ngryman]

Hi guys,

It's pretty much in the title, would you consider adding a copy on select option? If so I could open a PR.

Thanks!

[Tyriar]

@ngryman are there other terminals that do this? Wouldn't the fact that it's attached to an editor make it much easier to mess up your clipboard accidentally?

[ngryman]

are there other terminals that do this?

Yes, iTerm on OSX would be the most acknowledged.

Wouldn't the fact that it's attached to an editor make it much easier to mess up your clipboard accidentally?

Good point, but I don't think so for 2 reasons:

1. It would be an opt-in, so if the user enables it, he is perfectly aware of the feature.
2. It's copy on select, so it still involves a user action, that same user perfectly aware of the feature.

Those 2 reasons make a power user perfectly conscious of what is happening here.

The motivation for this feature is that when you actually select some text in your terminal, it's 99% of time to copy it and 1% because you have vision problems 🤓. Being able to copy on select simply removes an optional action for power users.

I would also suppose that VSCode users often copy/paste things from the integrated terminal to google errors or search a reference from an error stack in the code. So it makes perfect sense to offer them a way to simplify their life :)

[Tyriar]

This is blocked on the upstream issue: https://github.com/sourcelair/xterm.js/issues/1093

[Tyriar]

The upstream issue has been done and I just pulled in the change to vscode master, so this issue is unblocked and ready to be worked on.

[Tyriar]

Added in https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/pull/38287