Version: 2.4.3 (using KDE 4.4.3) OS: Linux Konsole copies tab characters as spaces. This makes pasting tabularly-formatted data into OpenOffice difficult. To reproduce: echo -e "a\tb" Copy the resulting output run xxd, and paste the resulting output on the console (into xxd's standard input) [bloom@zuni CORPUS_huliu]$ echo -e "a\tb" a b [bloom@zuni CORPUS_huliu]$ xxd a b 0000000: 6120 2020 2020 2020 620a a b. If I perform the same test in rxvt, it copies tabs as tabs: [bloom@cat-in-the-hat ~]$ echo -e "a\tb" a b [bloom@cat-in-the-hat ~]$ xxd a b 0000000: 6109 620a This is Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=583232 It's also previously been reported as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146146. You closed that bug because you said that the bug occurs somewhere lower in the software stack, and you can't fix it in Konsole. Since rxvt shows the correct behavior, I believe that the assessment you gave in that bug is incorrect, and that RXVT's behavior demonstrates that the bug is fixable in konsole. Please look into this again. --Ken Bloom Reproducible: Always
Different terminal emulators handle this differently. Testing using just the echo command and then selecting the text, the following emulators displayed individually-selectable spaces: aterm, eterm, rxvt, xterm, Konsole The following emulators displayed tabs as a single multiple-character-width character: rxvt-unicode, Terminal (xfce's), gnome-terminal. This seems like an artifact of old terminal emulation which konsole hasn't forsaken for a more modern convention especially when compared to the handling of double-width characters.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 168368 ***