terminal: Terminal breaks copied text at window line wraps, even when the text has no new-line characters

I recall this was working in older versions of Terminal and in Windows’ copy of the console window, but it seems to have broken more recently.

Environment

Windows build number: 18363.720 (Windows 10 ver. 1909 with update KB4551762) Windows Terminal version: 0.10.781.0

Steps to reproduce

Open this file in an editor: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsCodecsRaw.txt
Notice that the last line of the file “THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED”… is over 500 characters long.
Open Terminal to the Command Prompt or PowerShell, then run: type C:\Windows\System32\WindowsCodecsRaw.txt
Drag to select text from multiple in-window lines of the last line of the file, then right-click to copy.
Paste the clipping into a new file in Notepad.

Expected and actual behavior

Expected: the text is all on one line. Actual: the text is split into multiple lines.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 4 years ago
Reactions: 15
Comments: 17 (7 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Fix copying wrapped lines by implementing better scrolling (#5181) Now that the Terminal is doing a better job of actually marking which lines were and were not wrapped, we're not always copying lin... — committed to microsoft/terminal by zadjii-msft 4 years ago

Most upvoted comments

@paul-michalik you’re in luck because I’m working on this pretty aggressively over in #5181

zadjii-msft on Apr 7, 2020

For me as an Admin and DevOps this is a major issue - for example: ssh pubkeys are breaking when being copied and pasted.

For anyone who need to downgrade due to this, I can recommend to do this via choco like this:

choco list microsoft-windows-terminal --all
choco uninstall microsoft-windows-terminal
choco install microsoft-windows-terminal --version 0.10.761.0

Don’t forget to store your current profile.json somewhere - when you uninstall the Terminal app, the profile will be resetted to defaults!

Hope this helps.

ghost on Apr 1, 2020

@zadjii-msft I can constantly reproduce it even when the viewport does not scroll. I found it’s related to this:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/d47da2d617dbda3a46a1a052122536eca123b722/src/buffer/out/textBuffer.cpp#L1543

If I remove this mechanism, the copied text will not have extra new-lines.

skyline75489 on Mar 26, 2020

Turns out, it’ll only happen when it causes the viewport to scroll – like when you’re emitting text at the bottom of the window.

I’m not sure that’s quite right? I just tried starting Terminal with the profiles.json above and typing out the file, which doesn’t cause a scroll of the displayed area as far as I can see. After copying the first 3 displayed lines of the “THE SOFTWARE” line of text (up to “OR ANY DAMAGES W”), I get 2 lines in Notepad.

metathinker on Mar 25, 2020

Okay so we’ve been seeing various reports of this in the most recent build, despite doing some work to specifically handle this better.

Turns out, it’ll only happen when it causes the viewport to scroll – like when you’re emitting text at the bottom of the window. This explains why it seems like sometimes it works fine and other times it doesn’t.

Now that we’ve got a consistent repro, it should make debugging much easier.

zadjii-msft on Mar 25, 2020

🎉This issue was addressed in #5181, which has now been successfully released as Windows Terminal Preview v0.11.1121.0.🎉

Handy links:

ghost on Apr 22, 2020

@lindhe I’d recommend filing a new issue, with more details about your setup. Also, I’d recommend trying out Terminal Preview - I’m pretty sure there were some fixes in the 1.18/1.19 timeframe that might have helped with some scenarios around this topic.

zadjii-msft on Oct 11, 2023

This is still broken in “1.0.1811.0”.

ghost on Jul 13, 2020

As a workaround for now, resize the terminal window (enlarge or shrink) and try to copy&paste it again. It works for me.

hmageste on Apr 7, 2020