Eliminating Undesirable Input Characters

Wednesday, January 10, 2018 1:28 AM - jon

I am in the habit of cutting and pasting commands for Linux and Windows from my own documentation into XShell 6. I ran into trouble and discovered that my word processor was automatically changing some characters that I typed into "prettier" characters. Like hyphen to dash, double hyphen to long dash, standard double quote to left or right double quote, and more.

There are two issues related to XShell 6.

One: I have been unable to reproduce it to report it as a bug, but one of these situations was causing XShell 6 to do the equivalent of a Ctrl-U in Linux (delete the characters preceding).

Two: I would like to recommend a mechanism in XShell to detect these "undesirable" characters. Three ways come to mind: automatic conversion, a user-defined conversion process, or visual highlighting.

If there is a formal Suggestion process for New Features, I could not find it, so would appreciate any help.

Finally, I should mention that the odd behaviour noted above may have existed in XShell 5, so I was reluctant to report as a XShell 6 Beta issue.

Program Ver. : Xshell 6

Re: Eliminating Undesirable Input Characters

Thursday, January 11, 2018 1:06 AM - Support

Hi Jon,

For your first issue. We would need to know how to reproduce this issue to address it. Do you have any more details on the context of when this behavior occurs?

For your second issue, we currently have not implemented a feature that allows you to automatically change these "prettier" characters. I'll report this to our devs for further discussion. However, in the meantime, you have a couple options that I think might work for you.

First, if you would like visual highlighting, you can use Xshell 6's Highlight Sets feature (Tools -> Highlight Sets). You can have Xshell 6 detect, for example, the left and right double quotes, and highlight it to be yellow. You'll need to copy and paste the "prettier" quotes into Xshell 6's highlight set from your word processor as you won't be able to type it in directly. Once you apply the Highlight Set to the session, these special characters will automatically be detected and highlighted. You'll need to manually add each "prettier" character into the Highlight Set.

Second, you can disable AutoFormat in your Word Processor. For Microsoft Word, you can go to Options -> Proofing -> AutoCorrect Options.

Let me know if this helps.

Technical Support

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