Copying assistant response text from the terminal pane includes padding/line-wrap artifacts

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Sep 12, 2026

Problem

When copying an assistant response directly out of the terminal chat pane (mouse-select + copy), the clipboard picks up rendering artifacts along with the text:

  • A uniform left-padding/margin that the terminal draws around each message (the "box" the response sits in) gets included as literal leading space characters on every line.
  • Long paragraphs that are visually word-wrapped to the terminal width get copied with hard newlines at each wrap point, so pasting into an app that reflows text (email client, doc editor) produces broken/uneven paragraphs instead of clean flowing text.

Neither of these is part of the actual response content — they're purely an artifact of how the terminal renders and lets you select the message.

Impact

Any time a user wants to copy Claude's response text out to use elsewhere (email, chat, a doc), the direct copy is unusable as-is and needs manual cleanup, or a workaround like asking Claude to write the text to a file and pipe it through a clipboard tool (e.g. clip.exe on WSL) to bypass the terminal rendering entirely. That workaround works, but it's a lot of round-tripping for an extremely common action.

Suggested fix

A "copy clean text" affordance for assistant messages — e.g. a keybinding or click action that copies the raw response text (as authored, unwrapped, no padding) to the clipboard, rather than relying on the terminal's rendered/selected text. This is presumably already possible internally since the file+clipboard-tool workaround produces perfectly clean text — it's a matter of exposing that as a first-class copy action instead of requiring a manual workaround.

Workaround currently in use

Have Claude write the desired text to a file, then pipe it through a clipboard utility (clip.exe < file.txt on WSL) instead of copying from the terminal pane.

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