before we had graphical terminals with a mouse, was there just..

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

before we had graphical terminals with a mouse, was there just.. no way to copy and paste between different terminal programs? for example if you wanted to take something a program printed out and pass it as an argument to another program, what would you do?

was it "use some combination of redirects, pipes, $(), tab completion, !!, etc to make it work"? did people just retype things a lot? maybe `screen` helped?

feels like being able to just copy and paste makes a lot of things so much easier.

[z3r0fox@mastodon.social]

@b0rk How old is CTRL-SHIFT-C/V?

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@b0rk

i did a lot of send to temp file, read from temp file...

once i started using emacs, you could do shells in buffers and cut and paste between shell sessions.

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@paul_ipv6 honestly this maybe explains a lot about the design and popularity of emacs to me

[michaeltbacon@social.coop]

@z3r0fox @b0rk That emerged in early Microsoft programs, I believe. I'm not sure if the basic text editor had those (I kind of think it had Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert) but by early, non-GUI MS Word, I think they were there.

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk @paul_ipv6

LOL I was going to say exactly that!

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk

Generally, there wasn't so much "flip between different programs" as we take for granted now. You'd do a thing, save the results, and then do another thing.

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@MichaelTBacon @z3r0fox @b0rk

Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, Shift-Del is from IBM's 1987 "Common User Access" standard.

[mattdm@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk

For MS-DOS, there were "terminate and stay resident" programs like DOSCLIP which provided copy-paste functionality in fascinatingly horrific ways.

[vwbusguy@mastodon.online]

@mattdm @b0rk On Osborne, it was a whole lot of swapping floppy disks back and forth between drives. One floppy had CP/M, then another had WordStar. You would write your CBASIC program in binary mode and save it to a data floppy, and then put in the MBASIC floppy to compile the file you saved on the data floppy and if you booboo'd, it was back to the WordStar floppy or use ED from the CP/M floppy.