Make text selectable

[gitnik]

I can't find an option to make text inside my box selectable and thus copyable?

[pt300]

Uh. What?

[gitnik]

The docs don't mention how I can make it so that text inside a box can be selected via mouse.

Here I have a box into which I pipe the output of a gulp process. But as you can see in the gif I have no way of interacting with the text:
http://giphy.com/gifs/3otOKmBidQetuQ6Aww

[pt300]

That's not problem with blessed but with your terminal.
Usually you can have problems with selection when output gets updated. To prevent that you could try pausing stdout with ctrl+s, copy what you want and resume it with ctrl+q. That should at least work on Linux.

[pt300]

As I think about it now it might be also caused by blessed capturing mouse clicks.
You could try finding a way to disable that.

[gitnik]

Ok thanks I will give that a try

[gitnik]

mouse: false did the trick. thank you!

[LoganDark]

on mac you have to hold down fn because otherwise Blessed recieves all the mouse clicks

[tbranyen]

I found that on Linux (urxvt) you can hold down shift to select text.

[wearhere]

I have found that it is not specifically mouse: false that will enable text selection, but rather making
sure that screen.program.enableMouse() is not called. That method can be called if you use scroll/hover/click handling anywhere in your application, not limited to mouse: true, but also program.on('click'), the use of a hover style, or even enabling the debug log since that's scrollable.

Rather than try to disable all of those uses of mouse events, you can call screen.program.disableMouse() when you want to enable text selection, and then call screen.program.enableMouse() again when you want to use hover or click handling.

A really fortunate thing is that calling disableMouse not only re-enables native Terminal text selection, but also native scrolling. Let's say you have a Log component. By default that Log component will not scroll unless you pass mouse: true to it. So if you pass mouse: false (because you're trying to re-enable text selection), you'll break its scrolling. But then if you call screen.program.disableMouse(), you'll re-enable scrolling. (And, the scrolling will be at a much nicer speed than blessed's default scrolling imo.)