Many people have trouble doing copy/paste in CMD.EXE.
Indeed, there are no keyboard shortucts for this thing,
and the selection of the text to copy can only be done
through the mouse. You have to go to the system menu,
select "Copy", then do your selection, press Enter, go
again to the system menu, press "Paste", etc.
But there is a quick trick to do in CMD.EXE that can
speed up copy/paste in many cases. If you don't know it
yet, read on... Say that a tool outputs some text
containing a "word" (i.e. a sequence of non-space
characters). You want to copy this word as one of the
parameters to the current cursor position, while you are
editing the next command. The trick is surprisingly
simple and it takes less than one second to master:
move your mouse over that word, then double-left click,
followed by double-right click. That's it.
How does this work? The first double-click on the
left mouse button will select the word at the mouse
cursor position. Then, the first right-click will do the
"Copy" (since you do have some selected text). But the
text becomes automatically deselected. Then, the next
right click will Paste the selected text from the
clipboard at the current cursor. In the end, double-left
click plus double-right click does the job.
Warning: Note, however that you must
have "Quick Edit" enabled. This facility is disabled by
default, but you can enable it by opening the Properties
dialog in the CMD.EXE system menu (Alt-space, select
Properties), then go to the Options tab, and check
"Quick Edit Mode". It migth be useful to repeat the same
setting in the "Defaults" entry in the system menu such
that every CMD.EXE window will have Quick Edit enabled
from now on. And, if you prefer an
equivalent command-line method of changing the Quick
Edit default setting, here it is:
REG.EXE add
HKCU\Console /v QuickEdit /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
