Copy with Control Sequences

[fflaten]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

Option to copy text from the terminal with ANSI sequences. Useful when you need to copy styled output to another file like a markdown codefence with ansi-support (ex. expressive-code/expressive-code#29)

See similar option in iTerm2: Edit > Copy with Control Sequences

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

A new "Copy with Control Sequences" command that includes escape sequences in the copied text. Either include original ANSI-sequences if possible or recreate (best-effort) like iTerm2.

[FuegoFro]

Hey there! I'm interested in helping out with this, and I've gotten a very basic proof-of-concept version working locally: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/compare/main...FuegoFro:windows_terminal:copy_with_control_sequences?expand=1

But before I keep working on it I wanted to check in on a few things:

• I see that this doesn't have the Help Wanted label, what does that mean regarding outside contributions?
• In the CONTRIBUTING.md it mentions that the Issue-Feature label indicates it likely requires a spec; does that hold true here, or does this seem like the kind of thing that could be worked out on a PR directly?
• Maybe this is just a different phrasing of the above, but what would be the best way to proceed here? Should I open an RFC/WIP PR for high-level feedback? Continue discussion here? Take a stab at a spec? Flesh out tests/docs/functionality on that branch?

I appreciate any and all guidance here! 🙏

(also as a side note, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the docs and tooling here; I was able to go from "I've never worked with Windows-specific tooling" to "I have this up and running and can see the changes I've made" in a day, which is awesome 🎉)

[DHowett]

Oh man, this is so cool! Thanks so much for working on it!

Absolutely -- we usually mark things "Help Wanted" if we think they'll be approachable for a community member. Getting down into the nitty-gritty of the text buffer usually isn't approachable.

In the time since you started working on that (maybe? I could be wrong!) @lhecker added a somewhat generic or genericizable function to TextBuffer that does the same thing. It's currently used for session save/restore. I wonder if y'all can converge!

I'm so glad you were able to get going¹ and I'm looking forward to your eventual PR 🙂

Footnotes

1. (I am eternally afraid that our project is too terrifically complex to get started on, so thanks for hatcheting through the wilderness) ↩