# TIL: Terminals Support Area Selection

#TIL
#terminal

Typically, when you click and drag in a terminal, it selects all the characters between the start position and the end
wrapping over each line.

![](/images/terminal-select-by-line.png)

However, if you hold Ctrl while dragging, you can select an arbitrary area!

![](/images/terminal-select-by-area.png)

This is really useful for selecting data which is output in a table format, it can easily be copy-pasted somewhere else.
I'm not using a special terminal or anything like that; it's just the default GNOME terminal.

![](/images/terminal-select-about-info.png)