Long lines in output contain hard newlines, breaking copy-paste

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 16, 2026 by derekja Closed Feb 16, 2026

Description

Claude Code's output renderer inserts hard newlines (not soft wraps) when text exceeds the terminal width. This means copying any long line from Claude Code's output — whether from a code block or inline text — pastes with literal newlines and indentation at the wrap points.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Ask Claude Code to output a long single-line command (e.g., a long echo or adb command)
  2. The command wraps visually in the terminal
  3. Select and copy the wrapped text
  4. Paste into the terminal or any text field

Expected Behavior

The pasted text should be a single continuous line (the terminal soft-wrapped it visually, but the underlying text has no newlines).

Actual Behavior

The pasted text contains literal newlines and leading spaces at each wrap point, breaking the command. For example:

echo "this is a long command that should wrap around the terminal window to test whether copying
  and pasting works correctly with the new clipboard settings enabled"

Instead of:

echo "this is a long command that should wrap around the terminal window to test whether copying and pasting works correctly with the new clipboard settings enabled"

Environment

  • Claude Code (latest, via CLI)
  • Tested on both Ghostty 1.2.3 and iTerm2 3.6.6 on macOS — same behavior in both
  • Copying from cat or other terminal programs works correctly, confirming this is a Claude Code rendering issue, not a terminal issue
  • macOS Darwin 24.6.0

Impact

This makes it impossible to copy-paste commands from Claude Code output without manual cleanup. Long commands (e.g., adb commands, SSH commands with arguments) are frequently broken.

View original on GitHub ↗

This issue has 3 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗