da2x / tty-copy

Copy content to system clipboard via TTY and terminal using ANSI OSC52 sequence

tty-copy

A utility for copying content to the system clipboard from anywhere via a TTY and terminal using the ANSI OSC52 sequence. It works in any terminal session, whether local, remote (e.g. SSH), or even nested therein!

Refer to tty-copy(1) for usage information.

Supported Terminals

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the status of popular terminal emulators regarding OSC52 ^[1]:

Terminal	OSC 52 support
Alacritty	yes
Contour	yes
foot	yes
GNOME Terminal (and other VTE-based terminals)	not yet
iTerm2	yes
kitty	yes
Konsole	not yet
rxvt	yes (to be confirmed)
screen	yes
Terminal.app	no, but see workaround
tmux	yes
urxvt	yes (with a script, see here)
Windows Terminal	yes

Requirements

Runtime:

• UNIX-like system

Build:

• C compiler and linker supporting at least C99 (tested with clang and gcc)

• GNU Make

• Asciidoctor (for building man pages)

Installation

On Alpine Linux

Install package tty-copy from the Alpine’s Edge community repository:

apk add tty-copy

On Arch Linux

Install package tty-copy from AUR:

yay -S tty-copy

Or use another AUR helper.

On Fedora

Install package tty-copy from the Fedora repositories (since Fedora 35):

dnf install tty-copy

Using Pre-Built Binary

🐧 Linux: [x86_64] [aarch64] [armv7] [ppc64le] [riscv64]
 macOS: [x86_64]

1. Download and verify tty-copy binary for your CPU architecture (pick the right link from the list above), for example:

   curl -sSLO https://github.com/jirutka/tty-copy/releases/download/v0.2.2/tty-copy.x86_64-linux
   curl -sSL https://github.com/jirutka/tty-copy/releases/download/v0.2.2/checksums.txt | sha256sum -c --ignore-missing

2. Install tty-copy somewhere on your PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin:

   install -m 755 tty-copy.* /usr/local/bin/tty-copy

All binaries are statically linked with musl libc, so they work on every Linux system (distro) regardless of used libc.

From Source Tarball

wget https://github.com/jirutka/tty-copy/archive/v0.2.2/tty-copy-0.2.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf tty-copy-0.2.2.tar.gz
cd tty-copy-0.2.2

make build
make install DESTDIR=/ prefix=/usr/local

Credits

This program is inspired from termcopy and vim-oscyank.

License

This project is licensed under MIT License. For the full text of the license, see the LICENSE file.

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1. This list was originally copied from vim-oscyank.