tmux-copyrat

A tmux-plugin for copy-pasting spans of text from the tmux pane's history into a clipboard.

Use case: you're in tmux and press the key binding to highlight, say dates. This makes tmux-copyrat search within tmux's current pane history and highlight all spans of text which correspond to a date. All spans are displayed with a one or two key hint, which you can then press to copy-paste the span into the tmux clipboard or the system clipboard. Check out the demo below.

The name is a tribute to tmux-copyrat, which I used for many years.

Demo

Usage

Restart tmux after the plugin is installed and configured (see both INSTALLATION.md and CONFIGURATION.md pages). Press one of the pre-defined tmux key-bindings (see table below) in order to highlight spans of text matching a specific pattern. To yank some text span in the tmux buffer, press the corresponding hint, or press Esc to cancel and exit.

If instead you want to yank the text span into the system clipboard, either press the caps version of the key hint (for instance E instead of e), or first toggle the destination buffer with the space key and press the hint with no caps.

You can also use the n and N (or Up and Down) keys to move focus across the highlighted spans. Press y to yank the focused span into the tmux buffer, or press Y to yank it into the system clipboard.

By default, span highlighting starts from the bottom of the terminal, but you can reverse that behavior with the --reverse option (more on that in the Configuration.md page). The --focus wrap-around option makes navigation go back to the first span.

Matched patterns and default key-bindings

tmux-copyrat can match one or more pre-defined (named) patterns, but you can add your own too (see CONFIGURATION.md).

The default configuration provided in the copyrat.tmux plugin file provides the following key-bindings. Because they all start with prefix + t, the table below only lists the keyboard key that comes after. For instance, for URLs, the key is u, but you should type prefix + t + u.

key binding	searches for	pattern name
c	Hex color codes	hexcolor
d	Dates or datetimes	datetime
D	Docker/Podman IDs	docker
e	Emails	email
G	String of 4+ digits	digits
h	SHA-1/-2 short & long	sha
m	Markdown URLs [..](matched-url)	markdown-url
p	Abs. and rel. filepaths	path
P	Hex numbers and pointer addresses	pointer-address
	strings inside single quotes	quoted-single
	strings inside double quotes	quoted-double
	strings inside backticks	quoted-backtick
q	strings inside single/double/backticks
u	URLs	url
U	UUIDs	uuid
v	version numbers	version
4	IPv4 addresses	4
6	IPv6 addresses	6
space	All patterns

The copyrat companion executable

The central binary of this crate is tmux-copyrat, however there is also the copyrat executable which provides the same functionality minus any tmux dependency or integration and instead reads from stdin.

You can use copyrat to search a span of text that you provide to stdin.

For instance here is a bunch of text, with dates and git hashes which you can search with copyrat.

$ echo -n '* e006b06 - (12 days ago = 2021-03-04T12:23:34) e006b06 e006b06 swapper: Make quotes\n/usr/local/bin/git\n\nlorem\n/usr/local/bin\nlorem\nThe error was `Error no such file`\n/usr/local/bin/git' \
    | ./target/release/copyrat -r --unique-hint -s bold -X '(loca)' -x sha datetime quoted-backtick

You will see the following in your terminal

You may have noticed that all identical spans share the same hint, this is due to the -unique-hint option (-u). The hints are in bold text, due to the --hint-style bold option (-s). Hints start from the bottom, due to the --reverse option (-r). A custom pattern was provided for matching any "loca", due to the --custom-regex-pattern option (-X). The sha, datetime and content inside backticks were highlighted due to the --named-pattern option (-x).

Tmux compatibility

This is the known list of versions of tmux compatible with tmux-thumbs:

Version	Compatible
3.0+	✅
2.9a	✅
2.8	❓
2.7	❓
2.6	✅
2.5	❓
2.4	❓
2.3	❓
1.8	❓
1.7	❓

Please report incompatibilities as you find them, I'll add them to the list.

Standalone thumbs

This project started as a tmux plugin but after reviewing it with some friends we decided to explore all the possibilities of decoupling thumbs from tmux. You can install it with a simple command:

cargo install thumbs

And those are all available options:

thumbs 0.4.1
A lightning fast version copy/pasting like vimium/vimperator

USAGE:
    thumbs [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -c, --contrast    Put square brackets around hint for visibility
    -h, --help        Prints help information
    -m, --multi       Enable multi-selection
    -r, --reverse     Reverse the order for assigned hints
    -u, --unique      Don't show duplicated hints for the same span
    -V, --version     Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -a, --alphabet <alphabet>                          Sets the alphabet [default: qwerty]
        --bg-color <background_color>                  Sets the background color for spans [default: black]
        --fg-color <foreground_color>                  Sets the foregroud color for spans [default: green]
    -f, --format <format>
            Specifies the out format for the picked hint. (%U: Upcase, %H: Hint) [default: %H]

        --hint-bg-color <hint_background_color>        Sets the background color for hints [default: black]
        --hint-fg-color <hint_foreground_color>        Sets the foregroud color for hints [default: yellow]
    -p, --position <position>                          Hint position [default: left]
    -x, --regexp <regexp>...                           Use this regexp as extra pattern to match
        --select-bg-color <select_background_color>    Sets the background color for selection [default: black]
        --select-fg-color <select_foreground_color>    Sets the foreground color for selection [default: blue]
    -t, --target <target>                              Stores the hint in the specified path

If you want to enjoy terminal hints, you can do things like this without tmux:

> alias pick='thumbs -u -r | xsel --clipboard -i'
> git log | pick

Or multi selection:

> git log | thumbs -m
1df9fa69c8831ac042c6466af81e65402ee2a007
4897dc4ecbd2ac90b17de95e00e9e75bb540e37f

Standalone thumbs has some similarities to FZF.

Background

As I said, this project is based in tmux-fingers. Morantron did an extraordinary job, building all necessary pieces in Bash to achieve the text picker behaviour. He only deserves my gratitude for all the time I have been using tmux-fingers.

During a Fosdem conf, we had the idea to rewrite it to another language. He had these thoughts many times ago but it was hard to start from scratch. So, we decided to start playing with Node.js and react-blessed, but we detected some unacceptable latency when the program booted. We didn't investigate much about this latency.

During those days another alternative appeared, called tmux-picker, implemented in python and reusing many parts from tmux-fingers. It was nice, because it was fast and added original terminal color support.

I was curious to know if this was possible to be written in Rust, and soon I realized that was something doable. The ability to implement tests for all critic parts of the application give you a great confidence about it. On the other hand, Rust has an awesome community that lets you achieve this kind of project in a short period of time.

Run code-coverage

Install the llvm-tools-preview component and grcov

rustup component add llvm-tools-preview
cargo install grcov

Install nightly

rustup toolchain install nightly

The following make invocation will switch to nigthly run the tests using Cargo, and output coverage HTML report in ./coverage/

make coverage

The coverage report is located in ./coverage/index.html

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT license

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.