Pasting text into emacs on Macintosh

Question

I'm on a Macintosh and am using "terminal" for my shell. When I copy text from any window (via mouse drag then right mouse button menu -> copy) and then I paste the text (right mouse button -> paste) into a terminal with emacs running, it doesn't act as a paste. Instead, it is just like entering or typing in text. The problem occurs when the text is indented. Emacs does its auto-indentation on top of that so I get a cascading staircase-like look of text. I just want it to be a true "paste" so that whatever was copied shows up exactly as it was. Any ideas on how to change something to get this to work?

Answer 1

Try this:

(defun pt-pbpaste ()
  "Paste data from pasteboard."
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region
   (point)
   (if mark-active (mark) (point))
   "pbpaste" nil t))

(defun pt-pbcopy ()
  "Copy region to pasteboard."
  (interactive)
  (print (mark))
  (when mark-active
    (shell-command-on-region
     (point) (mark) "pbcopy")
    (kill-buffer "*Shell Command Output*")))

(global-set-key [?\C-x ?\C-y] 'pt-pbpaste)
(global-set-key [?\C-x ?\M-w] 'pt-pbcopy)

Use C-x C-y to paste and C-x M-w to copy.

Answer 2

For a quick and dirty solution which doesn't require configuring custom commands, you can run shell-command with a prefix argument to insert the results of calling pbpaste into the current buffer.

Thus:

C-u M-! pbpaste <RET>