4.11.1 Pasting in Rich Text Format
If you enable ‘Paste to clipboard in RTF as well as plain text’, PuTTY will write formatting information to the clipboard as well as the actual text you copy. The effect of this is that if you paste into (say) a word processor, the text will appear in the word processor in the same font, colour, and style (e.g. bold, underline) PuTTY was using to display it.
This option can easily be inconvenient, so by default it is disabled.
4.11.2 Changing the actions of the mouse buttons
PuTTY's copy and paste mechanism is by default modelled on the Unix xterm application. The X Window System uses a three-button mouse, and the convention is that the left button selects, the right button extends an existing selection, and the middle button pastes.
Windows often only has two mouse buttons, so in PuTTY's default configuration (‘Compromise’), the right button pastes, and the middle button (if you have one) extends a selection.
If you have a three-button mouse and you are already used to the xterm arrangement, you can select it using the ‘Action of mouse buttons’ control.
Alternatively, with the ‘Windows’ option selected, the middle button extends, and the right button brings up a context menu (on which one of the options is ‘Paste’). (This context menu is always available by holding down Ctrl and right-clicking, regardless of the setting of this option.)
4.11.3 ‘Shift overrides application's use of mouse’
PuTTY allows the server to send control codes that let it take over the mouse and use it for purposes other than copy and paste. Applications which use this feature include the text-mode web browser links, the Usenet newsreader trn version 4, and the file manager mc (Midnight Commander).
When running one of these applications, pressing the mouse buttons no longer performs copy and paste. If you do need to copy and paste, you can still do so if you hold down Shift while you do your mouse clicks.
However, it is possible in theory for applications to even detect and make use of Shift + mouse clicks. We don't know of any applications that do this, but in case someone ever writes one, unchecking the ‘Shift overrides application's use of mouse’ checkbox will cause Shift + mouse clicks to go to the server as well (so that mouse-driven copy and paste will be completely disabled).
If you want to prevent the application from taking over the mouse at all, you can do this using the Features control panel; see
section 4.6.2
.
4.11.4 Default selection mode
As described in
section 3.1.1
, PuTTY has two modes of selecting text to be copied to the clipboard. In the default mode (‘Normal’),
dragging the mouse from point A to point B selects to the end of the line containing A, all the lines in between, and from the very beginning of the line containing B. In the other mode (‘Rectangular block’), dragging the mouse between two points defines a rectangle, and everything within that rectangle is copied.
Normally, you have to hold down Alt while dragging the mouse to select a rectangular block. Using the ‘Default selection mode’ control, you can set rectangular selection as the default, and then you have to hold down Alt to get the normal behaviour.
4.11.5 Configuring word-by-word selection
PuTTY will select a word at a time in the terminal window if you double-click to begin the drag. This panel allows you to control precisely what is considered to be a word.
Each character is given a class, which is a small number (typically 0, 1 or 2). PuTTY considers a single word to be any number of adjacent characters in the same class. So by modifying the assignment of characters to classes, you can modify the word-by-word selection behaviour.