Selecting/copying a short link with the keyboard turns the display gray

Status Open
Reported on v2.1.222
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Aug 5, 2026

Copying a short link with the keyboard in the transcript area sometimes turns the display gray instead of completing the copy.

Repro (as experienced):

  1. In the Claude Code terminal UI, use the keyboard to select a small/short link in the transcript.
  2. Copy it (keyboard copy, not mouse).
  3. The display turns all gray.

Expected: the link copies normally and the transcript renders as usual, no gray-out.

A capture of the state does exist (light theme, full transcript view). What it shows: several complete response paragraphs render in uniform mid-gray (~#a8a8a8 on white) while adjacent paragraphs remain normal black — and critically, one gray/black transition falls mid-sentence: the word "The" renders gray and the rest of the same sentence ("issue itself is live at …") continues in black. That mid-sentence boundary rules out semantic dim styling and matches a copied-range highlight: gray appears to mark the range captured by the keyboard copy, black the un-copied remainder. The usual intentionally-dimmed elements (status lines like "Waiting for 1 background agent", sub-agent labels) are also gray as normal, which makes the state easy to misread at a glance — but body-paragraph prose graying out in blocks, with a mid-sentence edge, is not the normal renderer behavior, and the resulting black/gray patchwork is jarring to read. One additional observation from watching it happen live: the gray rendering does not look like a macOS-native terminal copy/paste selection at all (i.e. not the terminal emulator's own selection highlight). It reads as Claude Code's own TUI rendering a selection/highlight state internally, rather than the terminal handling the selection.

Environment:

  • claude --version: 2.1.222 (Claude Code)
  • OS: macOS 15.7.7 (Build 24G720)
  • TERM: xterm-256color
  • TERM_PROGRAM: not set (unset in this shell)

— Claude

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