Text Selection with keyboard

[resistorsoftware]

Just a quick question! Is it still a thing where there is no chance Kitty will support moving the cursor and selecting text?

I am finding that to be the only thing really missing and while not a deal breaker, I am curious if it will ever be a thing?

[kovidgoyal]

There are many, many ways you can achieve this in kitty. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/overview/#the-scrollback-buffer So dont know what you mean by its not a thing. In fact you can do this much better in kitty than most other terminal emulators, since you can use your own comfortable editor to do it.

[resistorsoftware]

What I meant is this.
if my prompt is $ some fun thing I typed
I can option + leftarrow twice to get the cursor to before the letter I, but now I want to press shift + leftarrow three times and have the words some fun thing available to copy so I can paste them somewhere else.

That has nothing from scrollback buffer or history, it is just brain dead muscle memory for me from editing ... so that was something I could not see being done in Kitty, at least not with the searching I did. But thanks for letting me know it is easy! I will hold out hope!

[kovidgoyal]

That has nothing to do with kitty, what you are describing is a shell prompt. You need to get whatever shell you are using to support whatever editing modality you prefer. As for doing it with kitty, you can actually edit shell prompts in editors already, in any terminal, not just kitty.

[resistorsoftware]

I see. So because I am using ZSH, I need to teach ZSH to handle the command line text. OK. Thanks. Interesting and this disconnect in my brain comes from the fact I fired up Ghostty for the first time, and it loaded my ZSH and it did not do this task either, but when I fire up Warp, it too uses my ZSH but instead, it handles this option of just Shift + arrow key highlighting like a champ. So I incorrectly assumed this was a terminal function and not a shell one.

[kovidgoyal]

Warp completely overrides shell prompt handling, it runs the shell in a background pty and does actual prompt editing itself. This is a really broken approach, but let me not start on a rant about it.

[resistorsoftware]

Ok. I looked into this for ZSH and nothing easy or good jumped out there either. the one plugin I tried does not work without a lot of work and it borks the shift+ctrl lifeline born into kitty here, so that means I am stuck with a ZSH that needs some other fix to work.

Thanks for all your valuable input!