Claude Copy

Copy text from Claude Code's terminal UI and paste it clean.

When you select and copy text from Claude Code, your clipboard gets filled with rendering junk: extra margins, box-drawing characters, trailing spaces, and hard line breaks from terminal wrapping. You paste it somewhere and it looks wrong.

claude-copy fixes your clipboard automatically. It runs as a Hammerspoon key interceptor on macOS, catches Cmd+C in terminal apps, and cleans Claude TUI artifacts before you paste.

The problem

Copy this from Claude Code's TUI:

  │ I showed this to my uncle who fishes every weekend. His jaw dropped. A pen-sized fishing
  │ rod that extends to a full meter, aluminum alloy, with a reel included. Under a dollar to
  │  source. $21 profit per sale.

Paste it somewhere. You get:

I showed this to my uncle who fishes every weekend. His jaw dropped. A pen-sized fishing

rod that extends to a full meter, aluminum alloy, with a reel included. Under a dollar to

 source. $21 profit per sale.

With claude-copy running, you get:

I showed this to my uncle who fishes every weekend. His jaw dropped. A pen-sized fishing rod that extends to a full meter, aluminum alloy, with a reel included. Under a dollar to source. $21 profit per sale.

What it fixes

Artifact	Example	After
Leading 2-space margin	··I showed this	I showed this
Box-drawing pipes	│ some text	some text
Trailing whitespace	some text·······	some text
Soft-wrapped line breaks	Line broken at terminal width	Rejoined into paragraph

It preserves structure that matters: paragraph breaks, bullet lists, numbered lists, headings, Key: value pairs, indented or code-like blocks, and hashtag lines.

Install

Requires macOS and Homebrew.

git clone https://github.com/andersmyrmel/claude-copy.git
cd claude-copy
./install.sh

The install script:

1. Installs Hammerspoon if you don't have it
2. Copies init.lua and clean.lua to ~/.hammerspoon/
3. Appends a dofile() line to your ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua (won't overwrite existing config)

Then open Hammerspoon, grant it Accessibility permissions when prompted, and reload the config. To update, pull the repo and re-run ./install.sh.

Or do it manually: copy init.lua to ~/.hammerspoon/claude-copy.lua and clean.lua to ~/.hammerspoon/clean.lua, then add dofile(os.getenv("HOME") .. "/.hammerspoon/claude-copy.lua") to your ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua.

How it works

Pipeline that runs when you press Cmd+C:

1. Intercept - catches plain Cmd+C only when the focused app is a terminal emulator (Ghostty, iTerm2, Terminal, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Hyper, Warp, Rio, Tabby, Wave). Copies from other apps are never touched.
2. Copy - sends a real Cmd+C, waits for clipboard update, then reads the copied text.
3. Detect (conservative) - scores Claude-likeness from multiple signals (2-space margin coverage, │ markers, diff-like patterns, wrapped-line shape, prompt negatives).
4. Tiered clean - high confidence gets strip + rejoin, medium confidence gets strip-only (no reflow), low confidence is left untouched.

Limitations

• macOS only (Hammerspoon requirement).
• Only plain keyboard Cmd+C in terminal apps is intercepted. Menu copy or mouse/context-menu copy is not intercepted.
• Detection is confidence-based and intentionally conservative. Ambiguous text may be strip-only or left untouched.
• Fenced code blocks (triple backtick) get flattened by the terminal's clipboard before our script runs. The terminal copies them as a single line with space padding. Indented code blocks (4+ spaces) are preserved correctly.
• Tested with Ghostty. Should work with iTerm2, Terminal.app, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Hyper, Warp, Rio, Tabby, and Wave.

Credits

Inspired by Clean-Clode.

License

MIT