Getting back old copy paste behaviour in tmux, with mouse

Question

This is what I used to do in tmux to copy-paste (using the mouse, the keyboard works differently and it is not what I am interested about):

1. Select text with mouse, left-button pressed
2. Paste text with middle-button

I have upgraded my OS, and this has gotten a new tmux version. I have not changed my .tmux.conf config file.

This is what I have to do with the current version of tmux, 1.6 (which comes pre-packaged in the latest crunchbang linux):

1. Select text with mouse, left-button pressed and shift key
2. Paste text with middle-button
3. Terminal gets blocked, a litte information area shows some numbers on the top right of the current pane (i.e. [0/24], probably something related to how many characters have been pasted), which mean little to me and I do not need / want (edit: it seems copy-mode is entered automatically here)
4. I have to press the q key to get a functional terminal again.

This is too much hassle for something I do dozens of times a day. How to get the old mechanism working again?

Answer 1

1. Copy the text: select the text and press mouse left-button with shift key press too.
2. Paste the text with shift key + middle-button

Answer 2

To restore the default copy/paste configuration you need to (at least temporarily) turn off mouse support within tmux:

prefix : set -g mouse off 

Where prefix is the tmux access key (Ctrl+B by default unless you re-map it). : starts command mode and set -g sets the parameter globally.

When mouse mode is turned off, the standard copy/paste functions provided by your operating system work as expected.

Something else you might want to do is 'maximise' the current pane, so you can copy multiple lines easily.

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If you’re working with an old (pre-2.1) version of tmux, you instead need to use the following:

prefix : set -g mode-mouse off 

There are more details and some handy key bindings to automate all this here:

http://tangledhelix.com/blog/2012/07/16/tmux-and-mouse-mode/

The main thrust of the article linked to above is this excerpt from .tmux.conf:

# disable mouse control by default - change 'off' to 'on' to enable by default. setw -g mode-mouse off set-option -g mouse-resize-pane off set-option -g mouse-select-pane off set-option -g mouse-select-window off # toggle mouse mode to allow mouse copy/paste # set mouse on with prefix m bind m \     set -g mode-mouse on \;\     set -g mouse-resize-pane on \;\     set -g mouse-select-pane on \;\     set -g mouse-select-window on \;\     display 'Mouse: ON' # set mouse off with prefix M bind M \     set -g mode-mouse off \;\     set -g mouse-resize-pane off \;\     set -g mouse-select-pane off \;\     set -g mouse-select-window off \;\     display 'Mouse: OFF' # zoom this pane to full screen bind + \     new-window -d -n tmux-zoom 'clear && echo TMUX ZOOM && read' \;\     swap-pane -s tmux-zoom.0 \;\     select-window -t tmux-zoom # restore this pane bind - \     last-window \;\     swap-pane -s tmux-zoom.0 \;\     kill-window -t tmux-zoom