Copy on Select 2 - A Productivity Tool Which Copies Selected Text to the Clipboard Automatically

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• Please continue to open new issues on GitHub (here).
  This might change eventually.

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• New commits will be pushed to SourceHut only (here).
  This might change eventually.

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Copy on Select 2

Are you used to being able to highlight text and have it instantly copied to the clipboard? Why not have this functionality in your browser as well?

This is a fork of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-on-select by late spyrosoft. See the version history below for information on what has changed since the fork.

Up to version 2.4 both add-ons shared a refreshing simplicity (10 lines of code only in the original add-on!). Starting with version 2.4, this fork began to grow to cover more use cases. But still the original principle has not changed: Whenever you raise a mouse button, the current selection, if any, is copied to the clipboard.

This works in many cases, but not always. Here are some cases which are difficult or outright impossible to handle for this add-on:

• Technically impossible:

  Firefox user interface elements outside of the main web page (URL bar, dialogues, etc.)

  Special Firefox pages (about:*, view-source:*), XML documents

  Disabled input elements of a web page

• Probably possible, probably not:

  JavaScript-heavy web pages, in particular if they do funny things with the selection (https://docs.google.com)

Please consider opening an issue on the support site if you experience a web page where this add-on does not copy-on-select.

Much more feature-complete, probably even feature-bloated, is AutocopySelection2Clipboard, but that disappeared from AMO in early 2022. Another alternative is AutoCopy.

Installation

• Mozilla Firefox

  

• Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Ungoogled Chromium)

  Download the latest CRX package from the release page and drag-and-drop it onto your browser or open it as a file with Ctrl+O.

Known Issues

Version 2.6

• Option "Copy-on-select in input elements" is not effective on chromium-based browsers. In the sense that on these you cannot disable copy-on-select in input elements.

  The same is true for non-standard input fields on all browsers, see "pontoon.mozilla.org" input form problem.

Version History

Version 2.6

• Implements RFE Version for chromium web browsers.

  Polyfills missing APIs. Adds release steps to create an MV3, CRX3 package (while leaving MV2 for the Firefox XPI).

Version 2.5

• Fixes issue Does not work on local web pages in htmlz format.

  Tracks document changes to properly update event handlers.

Version 2.4

• Implements RFE Enable copy-on-select for input fields.

  Provides an option to control this feature.

• Uses non-deprecated APIs to write to the clipboard.

  Requires an additional permission to implement this ("Input data to the clipboard").

Version 2.3

• Fixes issue Use more appropriate event sources.

  (And still 10 lines of code only! But they are getting longer.)

Version 2.2

• Supports copy-on-select in iframes.

Version 2.1

• Fixes issue Dont work at docs.google.com/spreadsheets:

  Ignores all events on pages from docs.google.com.

Version 2.0

• Provides a clone of the original add-on with metadata modified to extend its scope also to file-based URLs.