enhancement request: allow text selection/copying in non-editing areas

rogual / neovim-dot-app

Mac OS X GUI for Neovim

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Closed mattsawyer77 closed 8 years ago

mattsawyer77 commented 8 years ago

Not sure how possible this is. But it would be convenient if we could select/copy text from non-editing areas, e.g. the output of :messages.

rogual commented 8 years ago

Two ways of doing this:

Get the change made in neovim itself, then no changes needed here.
Add a separate kind of mouse selection to Neovim.app. When used, mouse commands are not sent to Neovim but processed directly in Neovim.app. Keep a record of which character cells are selected. Make the copy command behave differently when in this mode. This also requires keeping a buffer containing all the text currently on the screen, which we don't do right now.

rogual commented 8 years ago

Depending on your needs, you might be able to get by with something like

:tabnew | :redir @a | :silent messages | :redir END | :normal "ap

which will open :messages in an ordinary buffer. It's not as good as having the suggested feature, but it might be enough for some use cases.

mattsawyer77 commented 8 years ago

@rogual thanks for the tip. that solves my concerns in a flexible way.