How do I disable the weird characters from "bracketed paste mode" on the Mac OS X default terminal?

Question

I encountered a problem with my terminal where when I paste text, it is prefixed by 00~ and suffixed with 01~.

For example, I will highlight text and push Command-C. I then push Command-V into the terminal and I see those weird characters pop up at the beginning and end of the text.

For example, I can highlight text and paste it into the terminal. I then see 00~text01~.

The text can be from anywhere, even from the Terminal itself. I do not have any copy/paste plugins installed, this is just the normal Copy/Paste. I am using the default Mac Terminal without any modifications.

I did some searching online, apparently the Paste wraps the text in special characters so that certain applications will see that this is pasted text and will handle it properly. However, the terminal is not handling this correctly, and is therefore not removing the weird characters. Apparently this paste mode is called the "Bracketed Paste Mode" http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h2-Bracketed-Paste-Mode

I found another question that gave a solution on how to solve this issue on a linux machine, but after trying that solution I still have that same problem.

Can someone tell me how I can disable bracketed paste mode for the terminal? Or tell me the right way to get rid of these annoying characters?

Answer 1

This may not apply directly to your problem, but I found this symptom to probably, in my case, be caused by my editor-of-choice 'mcedit' (Midnight Commander)

To alleviate the bug problem, I added the following function to my .bashrc file:

### vvv 'function mcedit' is a fix-up for the ~0/~1 paste problem function mcedit() { command mcedit $@ ; printf '\e[?2004l' ; }

Then 'source .bashrc'

Now every time I execute 'mcedit', it automatically adds the 'printf "\e[?2004l"' when I close out to reset the "Bracketed Paste Mode"

Works for me, YMMV.

Answer 2

What happens when text is pasted

1. Text has made it into the "system" (e.g. X, MacOS/Aqua) copy buffer from somewhere, maybe from the same terminal. The text is not altered here.

2. The text is pasted into the terminal; that is, "system" sees to that the terminal (e.g. xterm) receives the unaltered character sequence from the copy buffer. The terminal is aware that this is a paste, not keyboard input.

3. The terminal sends the char sequence in the buffer to the program running in the foreground (a shell, an editor, whatever). To the program the received data is indistinguishable from user input through the keyboard.

Discussion

This transparency (or opaqueness? whatever) is often a good thing much like the Unix paradigm of transparent pipe plumbing in general. But sometimes programs could deal with the data better if they knew it is pasted. For example an editor like vim could switch off auto indent — after all, the code is likely indented already!

Bracketed paste

Enter bracketed paste. For principal reasons the paradigm of transparent data piping cannot be altered; but the data can be decorated with sequences which would ordinarily not appear in terminal input to mark its start and end. If the terminal is so configured — for the xterm the configuration would be to send ESC [ ? 2 0 0 4 h — the pasted data is bracketed with escape sequences: ESC [ 2 0 0 ~ <buffer contents> ESC [ 2 0 1 ~.

The foreground program receives this "decorated" data, and it's up to to the program to handle it. A naive program treats all of it as user input, which is what you see.

A good discussion of bracketed paste can be found in this article.

Remedies

There are two issues in your case: The terminal ends up unexpectedly in bracketed paste mode; and the receiving program — presumably the shell — does not handle it.

• One solution is user83536's: Identify the program which leaves the terminal in that state and call it through a wrapper which simply switches bracketed paste mode off again after the program has ended.

• The program probably tried to switch bracketed paste mode off but failed. One reason can be that it sends the wrong escape sequence. Try setting the TERMINAL environment variable to the value best describing your terminal.

• Try to switch off bracketed paste in the offending application. In vim one would say set t_BE=. That prevents vim from putting the terminal in bracketed paste mode and when it is set in a session, sends the "end bracketed paste mode" to the terminal.

• Embrace bracketed paste. It seems to be a good idea. For the bash and other programs using readline one would put set enable-bracketed-paste on. For vim one could follow the suggestions here.