Copied text includes 2-space leading indentation from rendered output
Open 💬 10 comments Opened Mar 23, 2026 by fotodeveloper
Description
When copying text from Claude Code CLI output in the terminal, each line includes 2 leading spaces that come from the rendering padding. This makes pasted text incorrectly indented, requiring manual cleanup every time.
Steps to reproduce
- Run Claude Code in any terminal (iTerm2, Terminal.app, etc.)
- Ask Claude any question that produces a text response
- Select and copy part of the response
- Paste into any text editor
Expected behavior
Copied text should not include the visual padding/margin used for rendering. The clipboard content should match the logical content, not the visual layout.
Actual behavior
Every line of copied text starts with 2 extra spaces. For example, copying a code snippet or explanation results in:
This is the first line
This is the second line
instead of:
This is the first line
This is the second line
Impact
- Pasting code snippets requires manual dedent every time
- Pasting into chat/docs/emails looks incorrectly formatted
- Rectangular selection (Alt+drag) is a workaround but not ergonomic for multi-line copies
Suggested fix
Either:
- Strip the leading padding from the content that the terminal receives (render visually but don't embed in character stream), or
- Provide a config option to control output padding (e.g.,
output.padding: 0)
Environment
- Claude Code: latest
- Terminal: iTerm2 (also reproducible in Terminal.app)
- OS: macOS
This issue has 10 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗