Copy the command output between the prompts

[ymotongpoo]

Hi all, I've recently switched to WezTerm and I'm totally enjoying using it. Thank you for the awesome product and great community around it.

Now I'm trying enrich my WezTerm experience with the custom feature to copy the text between the last prompt to the current prompt. This is pretty useful when I write an operation logs, such as bug report and runbook documentations.

Though I have searched the way to fetch buffered text data from pane, I only could find Pane.get_line_as_text() and Pane.get_logical_lines_as_text(), so I supposed that is the only functions to get texts from pane. These should work when the command output is short enough and inside the viewport, like the way shared here, but in the case the command output is long enough and multiple viewports long, it doesn't work.

I would like to get any ideas on how to get text between the prompts. The best case is to fetch the text between OSC "133;C" and OSC "133;D" (reference)

I was wondering if it's possible for Lua API to:

1. Activate copy mode (wezterm.action.ActivateCopyMode)
2. Mark the start of the selection to the previous prompt (combination of wezterm.action.ScrollToPrompt(-1) and something that moves the cursor to the top of the viewport and mark selection start)
3. Mark the end of the selection to the current prompt (combination of wezterm.action.ScrollToPrompt(1) and something that moves the cursor to the top of the viewport and mark selection end)
4. Copy the selection to clipboard (maybe wezterm.action.CopyTo 'Clipboard')

but I couldn't find the way to operate cursor in CopyMode.

[wez]

Hmm, I haven't tried to automate this or do it completely without the mouse so far. I use https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/keyassignment/SelectTextAtMouseCursor.html to grab the semantic zone when I triple click:

local wezterm = require 'wezterm'

return {
  mouse_bindings = {
    {
      event = { Down = { streak = 3, button = 'Left' } },
      action = wezterm.action.SelectTextAtMouseCursor 'SemanticZone',
      mods = 'NONE',
    },
  },
}

I think it would be a reasonable request to expand copy mode to support something like act.CopyMode { SetSelectionMode = 'SemanticZone' } as well as act.CopyMode 'MoveForwardSemanticZone and act.CopyMode 'MoveBackwardSemanticZone' and/or Move(Backward|Forward)Prompt or similar to specify what kind of semantic zone you want to move to.

[ymotongpoo]

Thank you @wez for the quite spot on answer as the work around for my current demand. Also I appreciate your confirming that the operations I was trying to achieve is not possible with the current Lua API.

Definitely I will post a request regarding semantic zones. Again, thank you so much!

[rkabrick]

Does this answer remain the best answer? Setting this in my mouse bindings simply copies the entirety of text in the terminal, not just the most recent block. If that is what is meant by semantic zone that may just be my own misunderstanding