How do I cut, copy, paste and select all in a TextView control?

Question

I'm trying to cut, copy, paste and select all with the TextView Gtk control. Why the TextView control? Cause I can't seem to get the bloody TextEditor control to go multiline!

Anyway... How do I:

Cut text from the TextView control?

Copy text from the TextView control?

Paste text into the TextView control?

Select All text in the TextView control?

Here's what I've tried: 1 hour of googling.

and this:

TextView tv = ...;
TextIter start, end;
if (tv.Buffer.GetSelectionBounds(start, end)) {
  String selected = tv.Buffer.GetText(start, end);
  Clipboard clipboard = tv.GetClipboard(Gdk.Selection.Clipboard);
  clipboard.Text = selected;
}

from: https://stackguides.com/questions/26308501/gtk-textview-copy-and-paste - but that obviously doesn't work (hence my question).

I've also found this: http://docs.go-mono.com/?link=T%3aGtk.TextView The Mono GTK C# docs. There is so much stuff that just seems to be non-existent.

Still no answers? Please don't tell me that nobody knows how to Cut, Copy, Paste or Select All in a MonoDevelop C# app... The thought of that is truly horrifying. — jay_t55

user3473830 user3473830 · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-22T12:21:34

Basically you should work with Underlying TextBuffer from your TextView.

Selection

To Cut, Copy and Paste, First we should select the part we intended to Copy (or check and see if the buffer already has some selection or not), to select a part we should get an Iterator of type TextIter from buffer, here is how we can do it:

Here is an example for SelectAll:

var start = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);

var end = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
end.ForwardToEnd ();

textview.Buffer.SelectRange (start, end);

Here is an example is for selecting range [2,4] from text:

var start = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
start.ForwardChars (2);

var end = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
end.ForwardChars (4);

textview.Buffer.SelectRange (start, end);

TextIter have extensive methods for range selection for example ForwardChars() has a twin method BackwardChars().

To check if our TextBuffer has any selection we should use HasSelection Property:

var hasSelection = textview.Buffer.HasSelection;

Working with Clipboard

Now that we have a selected text we can simply use it with Clipboard actions.

Here is a sample for Cutting selected range [2,4]:

 var clipboard = textview.GetClipboard (Gdk.Selection.Clipboard);

var start = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
start.ForwardChars (2);

var end = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
end.ForwardChars (4);

textview.Buffer.SelectRange (start, end);

textview.Buffer.CutClipboard (clipboard, true);

Copying is very similar to Cutting we should only replace CutClipboard with CopyClipboard :

Here is a sample for Copying selected range [2,4]:

 var clipboard = textview.GetClipboard (Gdk.Selection.Clipboard);

var start = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
start.ForwardChars (2);

var end = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
end.ForwardChars (4);

textview.Buffer.SelectRange (start, end);

textview.Buffer.CopyClipboard (clipboard, true);

and finally Pasting something from clipboard is very similar to Cutting/Copying

Here is an example of Pasting some text from Clipboard to location 0:

var pasteLocation=textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
textview.Buffer.SelectRange (pasteLocation, pasteLocation);

textview.Buffer.PasteClipboard (clipboard);

Final Example:

As a final example, we set text to 123456 and then cut 34 from it and paste it at the beginning, the final text should be like 341256 :

void TextViewSample ()
{
    textview.Buffer.Text = "123456";
    var clipboard = textview.GetClipboard (Gdk.Selection.Clipboard);
    var start = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
    start.ForwardChars (2);
    var end = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
    end.ForwardChars (4);
    textview.Buffer.SelectRange (start, end);
    var hasSelection = textview.Buffer.HasSelection;
    textview.Buffer.CutClipboard (clipboard, true);
    var pasteLocation = textview.Buffer.GetIterAtOffset (0);
    textview.Buffer.SelectRange (pasteLocation, pasteLocation);
    textview.Buffer.PasteClipboard (clipboard);
}

How do I cut, copy, paste and select all in a TextView control?

2 Answers

Selection

Working with Clipboard

Final Example: