I'm sure this behavior won't change. TAB is not a regular character, it is a control character, just like let's say escape sequences that move the cursor; copy-pasting doesn't include those either. It's a bonus that gnome-terminal tries to remember when a tab was emitted, most terminal emulators don't do this (you always get spaces when you copy).
Tabs behave really weird when printed near the end of line. We'd need a special variable storing how many tabs were emitted that didn't move the cursor. Actually, we'd need to remember two values: there can be plenty of tabs printed that don't advance the cursor, followed by a letter (printed in the rightmost column, still not advancing the cursor), followed by again many tabs. It's just way too complicated and probably nobody's interested in counting those tabs. Note that when there's existing content (letters) and you move the cursor back and emit a tab, it doesn't override those characters, it just advances the cursor (that's the intent, a tab is a couple of "move the cursor right" operations rather than a couple of spaces) -- what should copy-pasting do then? It probably just can't be made consistent. Or, the only consistent way of handling them is always converting them to spaces. Consider keeping the tabs a convenience feature that sometimes works. There are other characters too that are lost when copying and pasting back, e.g. starting combining accents at the beginning of a line, too many combining accents over a character, carriage returns, form feeds, bell, etc... -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to gnome-terminal in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1353354 Title: gnome terminal swallows tabs To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1353354/+subscriptions -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
