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Select and copy multiple text bits in Firefox in one go

Did you know that you can select and copy multiple independent bits of texts in Firefox in a single operation without using add-ons to do so?

All you need to do for that is to hold down the Ctrl-key on your keyboard before you start to select text on a web page displayed in the browser.

You will notice that you can select multiple independent texts on the page to copy them all to the clipboard or process them in another way as long as you hold down the Ctrl-key during the operation.

This works regardless of the operating system that you are using and the only limitation of the feature is that it does not work with table cells.

While there is a bug for the feature on Bugzilla, it has been reported in 2005 and last updated in 2012 indicating that it is unlikely that a fix will be introduced anytime soon.

While that is unfortunate, it should work on the majority of websites that you visit.

Here is a short animated gif that I have created using the excellent GifCam which demonstrates the functionality here on this site.

firefox text selection

As you can see, multiple texts can be selected independently of each other. You are probably wondering what happens when you paste the contents. The answer is simple: everything is concatenated which means you paste one string that contains all text that you have selected previously.

Using Ctrl to select multiple bits of text is not the only built-in feature of the browser that comes in handy if you work with text regularly in the browser. It is for instance possible to paste text that you have copied to the clipboard as plain text by adding Shift to the operation. Ctrl-Shift-v pastes it as plain text without any formatting into the browser. 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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