tmux-superclick

A tmux plugin that makes mouse clicks smarter.

v1 feature: smart triple-click

Triple-click on a token of interest (URL, path, identifier with separators) and the cleaned token is copied to your clipboard. Triple-click on plain prose and the entire line is copied — matching native tmux behavior.

What gets stripped from a chunk before copying:

• Matched outer pairs: (), [], {}, <>, "", '', ``
• Trailing :line or :line:col (e.g. foo.py:42 → foo.py)
• Trailing ,.;:!?
• Unmatched leading or trailing brackets / quotes / backticks (e.g. 'TEST: → TEST, url) → url)

A token "looks interesting" — and therefore triggers chunk-copy — if, after cleaning, it contains any non-alphanumeric character. Plain words fall through to line-select.

Examples

You triple-click on	Clipboard gets
(https://example.com),	https://example.com
"~/foo/bar.txt"	~/foo/bar.txt
foo.py:42	foo.py
select-entire-hyphen-string	select-entire-hyphen-string
/select/a/path:100	/select/a/path
any word in this is a normal sentence	the whole line

The cleaned range flashes briefly in the pane as it's copied — same visual feel as native double-click.

Install

Tmux Plugin Manager (TPM)

Add to ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'BatsShadow/tmux-superclick'

Then prefix + I to install.

Mouse mode must be enabled:

set -g mouse on

Manual

run-shell ~/path/to/tmux-superclick/superclick.tmux

Requirements

• tmux 3.0+
• bash 3.2+ (the default on macOS works)
• A UTF-8 locale (default on modern macOS / Linux). Falls back to en_US.UTF-8 if $LANG/$LC_ALL aren't UTF-8.
• One of: pbcopy (macOS), wl-copy (Wayland), xclip / xsel (X11), or a terminal that supports OSC52

Configuration

The plugin has one user-configurable option:

Variable	Default	Effect
SUPERCLICK_DEBUG	0	When 1, every click writes a trace to /tmp/tmux-superclick.log

Enable from inside tmux:

tmux setenv -g SUPERCLICK_DEBUG 1

Then tail -f /tmp/tmux-superclick.log while clicking to see what the handler saw, what got cleaned, and where the selection landed. Lines are separated by a blank line between clicks. Unset with tmux setenv -gu SUPERCLICK_DEBUG.

Manual smoke test

After installing, enable mouse mode and triple-click on each of the following lines in your terminal. The expected clipboard contents are listed.

(https://example.com),                 -> https://example.com
"~/foo/bar.txt"                        -> ~/foo/bar.txt
see foo.py:42 for details              -> foo.py    (when clicked on foo.py:42)
http://select-url.com                  -> http://select-url.com
select-entire-hyphen-string            -> select-entire-hyphen-string
/select/a/path:100                     -> /select/a/path
this selects the entire terminal line  -> the whole line (clicked anywhere)

Tests

Pure-bash unit tests, no extra deps:

./tests/test_clean.sh    # cleaning rules
./tests/test_cells.sh    # UTF-8 cell-aware string helper

CI runs both on every push and pull request — see the badge at the top.

Known limitations (v1)

• Chunks wrapped across multiple display rows are not reassembled — only the clicked row is inspected.
• East Asian Wide / Fullwidth characters (CJK, some emoji) take 2 display cells but are counted as 1 by the cell helper, so they shift the highlight by one cell each.

License

MIT