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I just tried to select thousands of lines in PuTTY, and it was painfully slow. It doesn't seem like any keyboard shortcuts work, so I had to hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse cursor to the bottom of the screen. Then once the mouse cursor reached the bottom of the screen, the selecting of text stopped. This is different behavior from, say, Microsoft Word, where if the mouse cursor reaches the bottom of the screen, it will continue scrolling down and selecting text automatically as long as you keep holding the left mouse button down.

So once the mouse cursor reached the bottom of the screen in PuTTY, I had to continue moving the mouse down to continue scrolling down and selecting text. Once my mouse reached the edge of my desk, I accidentally let go of the left mouse button, and I had to start all over again.

Then I was able to have it continue scrolling down and selecting more text by moving the mouse cursor side to side along the bottom of the screen. This was still painfully slow, and it took well over a minute to select all of the text I needed. Is there any quicker way to select thousands of lines in PuTTY?

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    Copying text by selecting is great to quickly get what's visible on the terminal screen, but if you have thousands of lines I would rather pipe the output of whichever program you're taking this from into a text file and copy that. So command >output.txt, and then download (for example through FTP) or copy (for example through samba) that. I always have a simultaneous connection like that to a remote device I'm working on for this reason.
    – MiG
    Mar 31, 2022 at 21:14
  • Have you looked at superuser.com/questions/1186035/… ?
    – sbj3
    Mar 31, 2022 at 22:15
  • @sbj3 That will copy the entire scrollback buffer. I am interested in selecting/copying only a portion of the scrollback buffer. Apr 1, 2022 at 1:09

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