Search widget automatically grabbing clipboard contents

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Ray M

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Mar 21, 2023, 9:47:07 PM3/21/23
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Hey team, there's this OS-wide behavior where search boxes automatically update with the contents of my clipboard.  It's pretty annoying and unhelpful in general, but in iTerm it's particularly unhelpful.  I was wondering if anyone knows of an iTerm-specific way (or OS-general way) to disable it.

I'll be running tests on a remote system, periodically searching logs for some key word using iTerm.  Then the search box suddenly changes to whatever random code snippet or ChatGPT copypasta I happened to pick up in my clipboard.  Then I have to click the search box, and hit the down arrow on my keyboard in order to get the search term I wanted back

Thanks

George Nachman

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Mar 31, 2023, 2:11:32 PM3/31/23
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There’s an advanced pref to disable this:



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Ray M

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Apr 4, 2023, 7:10:00 PM4/4/23
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Thanks man!

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Brian Matthews

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Jun 2, 2025, 9:57:33 PMJun 2
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This fixes it so iTerm doesn't pick up the search from other apps, but not the other way around. For example if I search for 'hello' in Chrome then search for 'goodbye' in iTerm, then go back to Chrome, the search is now also 'goodbye'. Is that something iTerm can fix (I have the above setting set to No)? Or better yet, is there a system-wide setting (even of the 'defaults write' variety)?

Thanks,
Brian

George Nachman

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Jun 13, 2025, 7:46:26 PMJun 13
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Thanks for pointing that out. I made the change in commit a65e9f2ea7df91f1ef3a50adb6656b340566f324.

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