On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 05:21:28PM +0200, fran...@libero.it wrote: > I installed a Debian 10 (32 bit) on an old PC desktop and I saw that the > terminals (UX) doesn't have any menu above. > > How can I obtain a terminal window with menu above so that for example I can > copy or paste commands etc.?
There are a *lot* of different terminal emulators. Pick the one you like best. Some have menus, tabs, scrollbars... some don't. Some have only classic 16-color mode, some have 256-color mode, etc. Some may be configured by X resources, some may be configured by command-line options, and so on. Some of the most popular terminal emulators are xterm, rxvt-unicode, gnome-terminal, konsole, lxterminal, terminator. There are more -- if you want a full list, try "apt-cache showpkg x-terminal-emulator" and look at the lines after "Reverse Provides:". That said, the way one normally copies and pastes text does not involve a menu. Standard X11 selection pasting works like this: 1) Move the mouse to the beginning of the text you would like to copy. 2) Hold the left button (button 1) down. 3) Drag the mouse to the end of the text you would like to copy. 4) Release button 1. Now the text is highlighted, and selected. 5) Move the mouse to the window into which you would like to paste the text and acquire focus -- which may involve clicking, or not, depending on your window manager. 6) Press the middle button (button 2) once to paste the selected text. If your mouse lacks a middle button, it may have a scroll wheel. On such mice, pressing the scroll wheel as if it were a button activates the button 2 event. These are obnoxious as hell, though, because it's really difficult to press the scroll wheel like a button without also *turning* it, which may have other side effects depdending on the window where you've got focus. If your mouse has only two buttons and no scroll wheel, you may have to enable an emulation mode that lets you emulate button 2 by pressing the left and right buttons simultaneously. I don't know how to enable this off the top of my head in modern Debian systems, because it's been decades since I've seen such a mouse. There are some alternatives to steps 1 through 4. For example, in many terminal emulators, you can double-click or triple-click or even quadruple-click a piece of text in order to select it. The effects vary by terminal emulator and by where your mouse pointer is within a line of text -- this may select a word, or a whole line, with the definition of "word" being similarly fluid. Contrariwise, applications that do not come from a Unix background (e.g. major web browsers) may not have the same copy and paste selection semantics. In some of these applications, after highlighting a piece of text, you may have to press "Ctrl-C" to select it for pasting. (Don't do this in a terminal, because Ctrl-C has a very different meaning there!) Just be aware that this dichotomy exists.
