copy-paste is including the prompt

[Cosmos Nicolaou]

Hi,

I'm using 3.6.5, zsh and oh-my-posh. shell integration seems to be working in that I can see the commands in the toolbelt and features like command info work fine. The only thing that doesn't work is copy-paste across multiple command invocations is including the prompts. I seem to remember that this worked before I switched to my on-my-posh but I'm not 100% sure. What else could be going wrong or this just expected to work? Thanks.

Cheers, Cos.

[George Nachman]

I don’t understand precisely what is not working. Maybe a screen capture video would help?

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[Cosmos Nicolaou]

Hi George,

I've attached two screenshots, one that shows commands as entered and that the toolbelt recognizes the commands, and a second that shows the result of copy/pasting into a vi window. You can see that the prompt is captured by the copy operation. Is this what you would expect, or would you expect iterm to filter out the prompts from the text being copied?

Cheers, Cos.

[George Nachman]

Are you selecting multiple commands at once and doing Edit > Copy? That will copy the prompts. If that is indeed what you’re doing, what’s the use case for copying multiple commands’ output? How would you want them delimited?

On Nov 13, 2025 at 5:34:07 PM, Cosmos Nicolaou <cosmos....@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Cosmos Nicolaou]

On Tuesday, November 18, 2025 at 11:58:02 AM UTC-8 George Nachman wrote:

Are you selecting multiple commands at once and doing Edit > Copy?

 

yes!

 

That will copy the prompts. If that is indeed what you’re doing, what’s the use case for copying multiple commands’ output? How would you want them delimited?

I find myself cut-n-pasting into the various ai chatbots with multiple lines of command and output and it would be nice the prompts where omitted. So for:

promp> command0 <rprompt

output0

prompt> command1 <rprompt

output1

where to be pasted as

$ command0

output0

$ command1

output1

the funny thing is that gemini and chatgpt think this is what iterm2 does already and refer to various non-existent settings to control this behaviour!!

Cheers, Cos. 

[George Nachman]

That’s an interesting problem. It feels like a specific instance of something more general - like an Advanced Copy feature - but I can’t quite put my finger on what it would be.

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[Cosmos Nicolaou]

I find myself cut-and-pasting to/from AI chatbots a lot and I suspect I'm not alone in that. I'd argue that the more general feature is easing integration with them. It wouldn't be unreasonable for iterm to offer a 'share with ai of your choice feature' to make it easy to ask questions of what's going on in the terminal. A little like github offers an 'explain this error' button in CI logs.

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[George Nachman]

A lot has already gone into integration. There is a chat UI (Window > AI Chats) that lets the agent read the contents and run commands. It supports five different vendors’ APIs, and there is also Edit > Explain Output with AI. But perhaps this is not easily discoverable or I have missed some obvious integration points? Let me know what you looked for.

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[Cosmos Nicolaou]

I generally cut-and-paste to a gemini, chatgpt, etc chat window in a browser. I see that you have a plugin that enables AI chat within iterm2, but that won't help me with my broader use case. Anyway, if you don't think it's worthwhile then that's fine, I'll find another way. Thanks for developing and supporting iterm!

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