pastecleaner 0.2.1

Strip the gutter and padding from terminal output you've copied, so you can paste it cleanly.

pastecleaner

Strip the gutter and padding from terminal output you've copied, so you can paste it cleanly elsewhere.

The problem

Modern terminal agents and TUIs render output inside a bordered panel with a vertical gutter glyph on the left. This shows up in Claude Code, Codex CLI, Aider, Cursor's agent chat, Goose, Plandex, lazygit, k9s, and most git log --graph views. When you select + copy that text, you get:

• the gutter character (▎, │, ┃, etc.) on every line
• leading whitespace to indent past the gutter
• trailing padding spaces to the terminal width
• hard line breaks at the terminal width, not at paragraph boundaries

So a single flowing paragraph pastes as a jagged block that has to be hand-edited before it's usable in an email, doc, or issue.

Before:

▎ Heads up on the cache-invalidation pass: the current TTL sweep runs per-key      
  ▎ and holds the write lock for the whole batch, which stalls writers under load.  
  ▎                                                                                  
  ▎ Switching to a chunked sweep with a 256-key batch should fix it.                 

After pastecleaner:

Heads up on the cache-invalidation pass: the current TTL sweep runs per-key and holds the write lock for the whole batch, which stalls writers under load.

Switching to a chunked sweep with a 256-key batch should fix it.

Install

pipx install pastecleaner

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/bray-solo-tsaina/pastecleaner
pipx install ./pastecleaner

Updating

pipx upgrade pastecleaner

If you have the watcher daemon running (option 1 under "Running automatically"), restart it so it picks up the new binary:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist

Quickstart

The everyday workflow is three steps:

1. Copy some text from your terminal (select, then ⌘C).
2. Run pastecleaner -c in any shell.
3. Paste wherever you need it (⌘V).

That's it. pastecleaner -c reads the clipboard, strips the gutter and padding, and writes the cleaned version back. Your next paste is ready to go.

If you'd rather never type the command, see Running automatically for ways to skip step 2 entirely.

Usage

pastecleaner file.txt              # clean to stdout
pastecleaner -i file.txt           # rewrite file in place
pastecleaner -c                    # read clipboard, write back to clipboard (macOS)
pbpaste | pastecleaner | pbcopy    # same idea, explicit
cat output.log | pastecleaner      # stdin

Flags

• -c, --clipboard: read from the clipboard, write back to the clipboard (macOS; uses pbpaste/pbcopy)
• -i, --in-place: rewrite the input file
• --unwrap / --no-unwrap: force paragraph unwrapping on or off. Default is auto: on when a gutter is detected, off otherwise.

Supported gutter glyphs

Any of these are recognized as a left gutter and stripped: ▎ │ ┃ ▏ ▌ ▍ ▐. Detection uses a majority rule: more than half of the non-blank lines must begin with one of these glyphs. This way, incidental box-drawing characters in tree, git log --graph, and similar output pass through untouched. If no gutter pattern is detected, pastecleaner just trims trailing whitespace and leaves structure alone.

Running automatically

Four ways to avoid remembering to run pastecleaner -c yourself. Pick whichever matches your workflow. They're all optional; the manual CLI works fine on its own.

1. Clipboard-watcher daemon (macOS, recommended)

A tiny background process that polls the pasteboard and auto-cleans any content containing a gutter glyph. Runs at login, works across every app and terminal, zero keypresses.

Install:

pipx install pastecleaner        # provides both `pastecleaner` and `pastecleaner-watch`
mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents
pastecleaner-watch --print-plist > ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist

Check it's running:

launchctl list | grep pastecleaner
tail -f /tmp/pastecleaner-watch.log /tmp/pastecleaner-watch.err

Uninstall:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pastecleaner.watch.plist

The daemon only rewrites the clipboard when it sees one of the supported gutter glyphs; normal copy/paste is untouched.

Latency note: the daemon polls the pasteboard every 500ms. For the usual copy, switch apps, paste flow this is invisible. If you copy and paste within a single keystroke (rare), you may beat the daemon and get the raw gutter'd version; wait half a beat or fall back to manual pastecleaner -c.

2. Hotkey (one keypress)

Bind pbpaste | pastecleaner | pbcopy to a shortcut in:

• Raycast: Create Script Command → Shell Script, paste the pipeline, assign a hotkey.
• Alfred: Workflow → Hotkey → Run Script, same pipeline.
• macOS Shortcuts app (built-in): New Shortcut → Run Shell Script, pick a keyboard shortcut in the shortcut's settings.

Then: copy as usual, tap your hotkey, paste.

3. Slash command (Claude Code example)

Drop this in ~/.claude/commands/clean.md to invoke from Claude Code via /clean:

---
description: Clean the clipboard of terminal gutter/padding
---

Run `pastecleaner -c` in the shell.

Adaptable to any agent that can register a shell-invoking command. Aider's /commands, Codex CLI's tool hooks, and Cursor's custom agent commands all work similarly: have the command shell out to pastecleaner -c.

4. Post-response hook (Claude Code example, caveat)

You can wire a hook into ~/.claude/settings.json to run pastecleaner -c after every response:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Stop": [
      { "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "pastecleaner -c" }] }
    ]
  }
}

Caveat: the hook fires when Claude finishes its response, before you've had a chance to select and copy text. It only helps if you habitually copy during Claude's output (e.g. from a long reply) and paste afterwards. For anything else, the watcher daemon (option 1) is a better fit.

The same idea works with any agent that exposes a post-response or idle hook; the watcher daemon (option 1) is a catch-all that needs no agent support at all.

Development

git clone https://github.com/bray-solo-tsaina/pastecleaner
cd pastecleaner
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest

License

MIT. See LICENSE.