How to enable middle mouse button copy and paste with Cygwin?

Question

I have a three button mouse. Within a shell (I use bash), on either OS X or linux, the selecting text and clicking the middle button copies the selection and pastes it at the cursor.

However, using Cygwin within a Command Prompt on Windows XP, I have to use the select text, enter, right button sequence to do the same thing. Is there a way to configure Cygwin to behave the same as OS X and Linux?

Answer 1

You should install and use rxvt instead of the Windows terminal (cmd.exe). rxvt can be installed by selecting it under Shells in the Cygwin installer and it automatically creates two shortcuts to Programs/Cygwin branch of the Start Menu (at least if you initially allowed shortcuts to be created), one for X and one without. So, you don't need to install X to use rxvt.

In rxvt you can use the middle button like you have used to straight away, without any further configurations. If you want to configure some aspect of rxvt you should refer to

/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/rxvt-<version>.README

which lists different possiple configuration options and some samples.

Answer 2

another option is to install mintty, which supports x11-selection-paste behavior as well

Answer 3

You may wish to consider puttycyg.

puttycyg is a patched version of PuTTY that allows you use PuTTY as a local Cygwin terminal.

(Sorry, SU prevents me from linking to more than one site. :-( I can't even enter the URL to the original PuTTY.)

Answer 4

An AutoHotkey approach:

MButton::

Process, Exist, bash.exe

if ErrorLevel
{
    WinWaitActive, ahk_pid %ErrorLevel%
    Send { Enter }
    ClipWait
    Send %clipboard%
    return
}
else
{
    Send { MButton }
    return
}

depending on what shell you're using you may need to change the executable name. I'm not sure on the process name cygwin uses.