Noticed bash recently started highlighting pasted text? You're not going crazy!

tomocafe

We upgraded to bash 5.1 a few months ago now (Jan 20 to be exact), and with that came an upgrade to readline 8.1. With readline 8.1, the "bracketed paste" feature was made default, which highlights your pasted text (from primary selection) as well as reverse-search matches.

This has been low-key bugging me for the past 2 months, but I couldn't figure out how to search for the issue I was experiencing.

I imagine some people like this new feature, but for those of you who—like me—are not ready to embrace this change, you can revert back to the old behavior by changing either your ~/.inputrc or ~/.bash_profile:

Method 1: affects all readline clients (bash, python, ...)

Create ~/.inputrc and add this line (or append this line to your existing file):

set enable-bracketed-paste off

Method 2: only affects bash

Add this line to your ~/.bash_profile:

bind 'set enable-bracketed-paste off'

Screenshots

With bracketed paste enabled:

enabled

Disabled (old behavior):

disabled

elfprince

tomocafe I've added to my ~/.profile, since Solus reads that upon boot. Figured, that there is no need to create a separate ~/.bash_profile as well. 😀

WetGeek

I'm betting that I'n not the only one here who's confused about .bashrc and .bash_profile. I've put a number of useful aliases into my .bashrc files, in both ~/ and in /root/, and they work quite well. What would be a reason to create and use .bash_profile instead?

Girtablulu

WetGeek i use a separte file for aliases which I source inside of .bashrc and how often do you run around with su?

Harvey

WetGeek
From the bash man page.

When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable. The --noprofile option may be used when the shell is started to in‐hibit this behavior.

When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc, if that file exists. This may be inhibited by using the --norc option. The --rcfile file option will force bash to read and execute commands from file instead of ~/.bashrc.

tl;dr ~/.bashrc is loaded when you open a terminal. ~/.bash_profile is loaded when you login.

This becomes important when a command or environment setting should only be set/run once rather than every time you open a terminal. When it comes to aliases, you may want to alter aliases in the same session so ~/.bashrc would make more sense than ~/.bash_profile but its the other way around with the change the OP details.

EDIT:
Additionally before anyone asks.
~/.profile is read by every shell
~/.bash_profile is only read by bash

WetGeek

Girtablulu how often do you run around with su?

I never run around with su. I'm not even sure how to do that.

WetGeek

Harvey ~/.bashrc is loaded when you open a terminal. ~/.bash_profile is loaded when you login.

Thanks for a clear and concise answer.

tomocafe

So apparently this “bracketed paste” thing does serve some purpose: it’s a safety feature.

Without bracketed paste mode enabled, if you accidentally paste some text that you weren’t expecting into the terminal, and it contains newline characters, the shell will happily execute the commands separated by new lines as soon as you paste it. This can have some unintended consequences as you can imagine.

With bracketed paste mode, it won’t execute anything until you press enter. The inverted (highlighted) text is telling you that it was paste and that you need to confirm before it does anything.

So please keep this in mind before disabling bracketed paste mode.

Personally, I’ve been using bash for well over a decade and already am pretty careful about this, so I’m going to disable it. But maybe I’ll come around to it in time.

Solarmass

tomocafe So apparently this “bracketed paste” thing does serve some purpose: it’s a safety feature.

Good to know. Thanks for the info!
I have noticed this selection of the pasted text yesterday.

Solarmass

tomocafe With bracketed paste mode, it won’t execute anything until you press enter.

I think maybe an example of this would be the code on Flathub?
If you select the text by double click and past it to the terminal, it would execute it immediately:

But not if you use the copy button: