feat(desktop): copy and paste in the GUI terminal - #73705
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xterm paints to a canvas, so its selection is not a DOM selection: the Edit menu's Copy and the right-click Copy both call webContents.copy(), find nothing, and copy nothing. On macOS the menu also swallows the Cmd+C accelerator before the renderer sees it. That left Ctrl+C as the only key that did anything, and xterm correctly forwards it to the PTY as SIGINT. Mirror the selection into xterm's hidden helper textarea (the mechanism xterm already uses for Linux middle-click paste) so the OS sees a real selection and every platform copy path works, and add explicit chords on top: Cmd+C/Cmd+V on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+C/V elsewhere, matching VS Code. Plain Ctrl+C copies only when text is selected -- the behavior Windows Terminal and Tabby ship -- and stays SIGINT otherwise, so interrupting a process never breaks. Reads go through a new hermes:readClipboard IPC handler for the same reason writes already do: the renderer's clipboard API throws whenever the document isn't focused.
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૮ >ﻌ< ა ci reviewran on 807dc0c ℹ️ InfoDesktop E2E visual evidence · View test artifacts · View job1 visual diff. inline evidence upload failed. Failed to upload diff-665a0833239e-onboarding-overlay-diff.png with gh image (exit code 1): Error uploading /home/runner/work/_temp/e2e-evidence/diff-665a0833239e-onboarding-overlay-diff.png: step 0 (get upload token): uploadToken not found on repo page — do you have write access to NousResearch/hermes-agent? (or, if NousResearch enforces SAML SSO, authorize at https://github.com/orgs/NousResearch/sso) |
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Aug 11, 2026
…lipboard feat(desktop): copy and paste in the GUI terminal
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Copy and paste work in the GUI terminal now, on every path a person would try: the chord, the Edit menu, and the right-click menu.
xterm paints to a canvas, so its selection is not a DOM selection.
webContents.copy()— what Edit ▸ Copy and the right-click Copy item both call — found nothing and copied nothing, and on macOS the app menu swallowed the ⌘C accelerator before the renderer ever saw it (the same reasonmain.tsleaves ⌘W off the Close item). That left Ctrl+C as the only key that did anything, and xterm correctly forwards it to the PTY as SIGINT — so trying to copy killed the process.Two mechanisms, because the two failure modes are different. The selection is mirrored into xterm’s hidden helper textarea, which is how the OS learns there is a selection to copy — xterm already does exactly this for Linux middle-click paste. On top of that, explicit chords the terminal handles itself.
The chord table follows VS Code’s
terminal.clipboard.contribution.ts. The Ctrl+C row is the “intelligent Ctrl-C” that Windows Terminal and Tabby ship: it copies only when there is a selection to copy, so a running process is never interrupted by a keystroke that meant to copy, and copying never eats the interrupt.Clipboard reads go through a new
hermes:readClipboardIPC handler for the same reason writes already do — the renderer’s clipboard API throws “Document is not focused” whenever a portaled overlay holds focus.The agent process terminal gets copy but not paste; it has no PTY to paste into. Both chords appear in the keybinds panel as read-only rows, and the key map is a pure function covered by tests.