[BUG] Ctrl+V image paste in iTerm2 intermittently fails on macOS (still reproducible in v2.1.62)

Status Closed — not planned

Reported on v2.1.62

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 6 comments · opened Feb 27, 2026 · closed Apr 8, 2026

Environment

| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | 2.1.62 |
| iTerm2 | 3.6.7 |
| macOS | Darwin 25.3.0 |
| Node.js | 25.6.1 |

Description

\Ctrl+V\ image paste into Claude Code TUI works intermittently — it succeeds roughly 50-60% of the time. There is no visual feedback or error when it fails; the image is silently dropped and the input field remains empty.

This issue was previously tracked in #1361 and closed as completed, but the problem persists in v2.1.62 with iTerm2 3.6.7.

Steps to Reproduce

Take a screenshot using \Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4\ (copies to clipboard)
Open Claude Code in iTerm2
Click in the input field to ensure focus
Press \Ctrl+V\
Observe: image is pasted ~50-60% of the time; the rest of the time nothing happens

Expected Behavior

\Ctrl+V\ should reliably paste the image from clipboard every time.

Actual Behavior

Image paste silently fails intermittently. No error message, no feedback. The input field stays empty as if \Ctrl+V\ was never pressed.

Additional Notes

Clicking the input field before \Ctrl+V\ improves reliability but does not fully resolve the issue
Drag & drop of image files works reliably as a workaround
\Cmd+V\ does not work for images at all in iTerm2 (separate known issue)
The intermittent nature suggests a race condition or focus management issue in the TUI clipboard event handling

Related Issues

#1361 — Original report (closed as completed, issue persists)
#16753 — Cmd+V paste broken in iTerm2 on v2.1.0
#5392 — Clipboard image paste broken on Mac Terminal

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

github-actions[bot] · 7 months ago

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.

If your issue is a duplicate, please close it and 👍 the existing issue instead
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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

zelentsov-dev · 7 months ago

This is not a duplicate of the referenced issues:

#16753 — reports Cmd+V completely broken in v2.1.0. Our issue is about Ctrl+V working intermittently (succeeds ~50-60% of the time) in v2.1.62. Different symptom, different version.
#26901 and #2102 — report paste not working at all. Our issue is specifically about silent intermittent failures with no error feedback, suggesting a race condition or focus management bug in the TUI layer.

The key distinction: paste is not broken — it works sometimes and silently fails other times, which points to a different root cause (likely a timing/focus issue rather than a keybinding issue).

zelentsov-dev · 7 months ago

Built an MCP server that works around this — clipsnap-mcp Captures clipboard via Swift daemon outside sandbox-exec.

github-actions[bot] · 6 months ago

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.

hqhq1025 · 6 months ago

If you're still hitting this on macOS: clipaste fixes it. Tiny background daemon that auto-registers a file URL when screenshot image data is on the clipboard. Both Cmd+V and Ctrl+V work after installing.

brew install hqhq1025/clipaste/clipaste
brew services start clipaste

github-actions[bot] · 5 months ago

This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.