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A-Shell Consolidated Reference

Navigation: ATE > Operations

Copy and Paste

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Copy and paste operations in ATE work more or less as one would expect, with one important difference from normal Windows conventions.

Ctrl+C is a special keystroke in A-Shell, used to interrupt most programs most of the time. Ctrl+C also means "copy" under Windows.

So when a user hits Ctrl+C in ATE, what does she mean?

Here's how ATE deals with this issue:

If the user has selected some text on the screen and then hits Ctrl+C, ATE interprets the user's intent as "copy," and therefore copies the selected text to the Windows clipboard. In other words, Ctrl+C behaves in normal Windows fashion. After the copy-to-clipboard process is finished, ATE clears the selection.
If the user hits Ctrl+C when no text is selected, then ATE understands the user's intent to be an A-Shell-style Ctrl+C—i.e., program interrupt. So ATE transmits the Ctrl+C to the host computer.

To select text, use the normal Windows function of mouse click-hold-drag.

Once the selected text has been copied to the Windows clipboard, it of course behaves like all clipboard content--meaning that you can paste it in to other programs with the normal Windows keystroke of Ctrl+V. The right mouse button will normally offer a paste function as well.

To paste into ATE, put the cursor at the beginning of the field in question and then use the mouse or keystrokes to execute the Edit > Paste function. Although the paste operation is normally used only for one line of characters, it does support the pasting of multiple lines when you have a context (such as VUE) into which it is possible to paste data with linefeeds. Ctrl+V also normally works to paste text from Windows applications into ATE.