Copy explicit \t (tab) with tab, not spaces

[daniilr]

I am running Ghostty 1.0 on a mac. My shell is zsh. I was able to reproduce the issue in bash as well. The default Terminal.app works good.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cc5deea1-fce1-4bad-a800-e4c92f339d81
➜ ~ echo -e 'test\u9test' test test

Is this behaivour expected?

[qwerasd205]

Yes this is expected behavior. It's not actually 4 spaces, it's simply aligning to the next tabstop. Perhaps it would be a good quality of life feature to encode the tabs as state in a way that lets the user copy them as tabs instead of spaces though.

[mitchellh]

Perhaps it would be a good quality of life feature to encode the tabs as state in a way that lets the user copy them as tabs instead of spaces though.

Interesting.

Converting to a feature request discussion and renaming. I'd be curious next what other terminals do here. I'm willing to do something different, just curious!

[daiyam]

TE which allow to get back the tab character with copy:

• Terminal.app
• iterm2
• Kitty
• Alacritty
• TE based on VTE (most linux TE)
• Warp

TE which don't:

• xterm.js
• Git BASH (from Git for Windows)

About xterm.js, I did make a PR but was rejected and a discussion about that feature turned out to be a philosophical debate about the tab character.

Edit: add Warp

[indahazzard]

I've updated .editorconfig file to set indent_style to tab like this:

indent_style = tab

and this helped, not sure if it's your case.

[daniilr]

This will probably help for nvim when it saves a file, what I am trying to do is to copy and paste right from terminal

[mitchellh]

Okay, further question since other TEs do this. If I do the following sequence, what happens:

1. Cursor at x=0,y=0
2. Print "\tHello"
3. Cursor at x=1
4. Print " " (space)
5. Copy line

Does writing the one "space" turn the entire tab into spaces? Since tabs are translated into spaces for a terminal, I'm just curious how these sorts of edge cases are handled.

I'll write a shell script at some point to research this further.

[daiyam]

If I do the following sequence, what happens:

Short answer: I don't know.
I see the issue and I will try to look into it.

Here my goto script to test the tab support: printf "\033[48;5;1mred\t - \tred\033[0mnormal\n"
(it's include some color tests but that's very low priority).

[daniilr]

It seems that mac Terminal.app keeps both tab and space character

[Flimm]

I'm pretty sure that the correct behaviour is to keep space characters as is, and to keep tab characters as is. I don't expect my terminal to run sed on the output of commands (except for things like ANSI colour escape sequences).

I'm not sure that the command posted by @daiyam does test support for tab characters properly. We need to check that characters are copied correctly into the clipboard, regardless of which colour they are dispayed in.

These terminal emulators copy tab characters properly in my testing on Linux:

• Kitty
• GNOME Terminal
• GNOME Console
• Terminator
• Tilix
• XFCE Terminal

These don't:

• Ghostty
• Konsole
• xterm
• alacritty
• From my recollection, Windows Terminal also mangles tab characters and replaces them with spaces on Windows

[daiyam]

I'm not sure that the command posted by @daiyam does test support for tab characters properly.

I agree

I'm pretty sure that the correct behaviour is to keep space characters as is, and to keep tab characters as is. I don't expect my terminal to run sed on the output of commands (except for things like ANSI colour escape sequences).
We need to check that characters are copied correctly into the clipboard, regardless of which colour they are dispayed in.

I also agree. We only need the tab characters in the copy value.

alacritty

I think that's depend of the platform.

[Flimm]

I regularly copy TSV file output from the terminal and I paste it into Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc. In Kitty, GNOME Terminal, and others, the tab characters are preserved, and the cells get slotted into the spreadsheet correctly. It's a nice feature in the spirit of Ghostty's goals of integrating well with the rest of the desktop environment. Sadly, I can't get this nice intergation with Ghostty, since Ghostty replaces tab characters with space characters. Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc (rightly) don't try to handle spaces as cell separators, but they do know how to interpret tab characters.

Expected output (incudes a tab character):

$ printf 'one\ttwo\n'
one	two

Incorrect output from Ghostty (replaces a tab character with spaces):

$ printf 'one\ttwo\n'
one     two

If you're viewing this discussion in your browser, you can see the difference by highlighting the example output with your mouse. With spaces characters, you can highlight each space individually, whereas, with the tab character, you can only highlight the whole tab character.

[pe]

Same issue here. I have tools, that print tab separated values for copying to Excel. Works in iTerm and Terminal.app. Not in Ghostty.

[Oloremo]

Same here