Make the terminal's right button copy and paste, and never open a menu
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Selecting output and right-clicking it opened the WebView's own context menu with
Copy on it, which is correct behaviour for a web page and wrong for a terminal.
What a terminal's right button has meant since the Windows console got QuickEdit,
and since PuTTY shipped, is this: with something selected it copies and drops the
selection, with nothing selected it pastes. No menu, no second click.

The gesture can only live in the page. The selection is drawn into a canvas the
host never sees, and once a terminal has focus the host's window receives no input
events at all — the same reason the Ctrl+plus chords are handled there.

◆ THE CLIPBOARD IS THE HOST'S IN BOTH DIRECTIONS, AND THE READING IS WHY.

navigator.clipboard.readText() is gated behind the clipboard-read permission in
every Chromium, and an embedded WebView with no PermissionRequested handler
answers a permission request by putting a prompt on the screen. Trading a context
menu for a permission dialog is not this change. So the page asks and the host
answers, exactly as requestFontSizeStep does.

Writing does not go the other way either, although navigator.clipboard.writeText
would have worked from the page on Windows: a clipboard that is the host's in one
direction and the page's in the other is two mechanisms to keep working across
WebView2, WebKitGTK and Android's WebView. The host has owned a clipboard delegate
since the keychain grew its COPY buttons, so each App.axaml.cs grows a
ClipboardReader beside its ClipboardWriter and MainWindowViewModel takes it.

Three opcodes: client ClipboardCopy and ClipboardPaste, server Clipboard.

◆ Clipboard IS NOT Paste, AND THE DIFFERENCE IS THE BRACKETING.

Paste carries a snippet off the sidebar, and the page deliberately *types* a
single-line one rather than bracketing it, because bash marks a bracketed paste as
an active region and a snippet should read as though it had been typed. A clipboard
paste is the case those markers are for — readline uses them to decide it has been
pasted into — so Clipboard is always bracketed and never followed by an Enter. One
opcode for both would have needed a flag meaning "which of the two kinds of paste
is this", on a payload whose existing flag byte means something else.

Both client frames are dispatched before the session lookup, which is what keeps
the gesture working in a pane whose shell has just ended: squinting at the message
a remote left behind is exactly when somebody copies the line. Dispatch was past
MA0051's length once it grew a second such branch, so the frames no pump needs to
see moved into Announce() and the font-size chord went with them.

◆ CAPTURED AND STOPPED, RATHER THAN MERELY PREVENTED.

preventDefault alone suppresses the menu and still lets xterm's own contextmenu
handler run, which moves its helper textarea under the pointer at z-index 1000 and
leaves the selection sitting in it, selected. Both of those exist to serve the
native menu. Taking the event in the capture phase on the pane and stopping it
there is what keeps the gesture wholly the page's.

rightClickSelectsWord is now false, which on macOS is a change of default rather
than a restatement of it: xterm sets it true there alone, so a right-click would
have selected the word under the pointer and copied that instead of pasting —
wrong on one platform only, which is the worst way for it to be wrong.

The renderer harness grows the pane it has been inviting since
RendererReconnectionTests: a fake Terminal, the two addons, and a real UTF-8 codec,
because both directions run through the page's own TextEncoder and TextDecoder and
a Latin-1 stub would pass a test with an em dash in the selection. Its warning
about declaring names terminal.js declares now covers the half that does not
SyntaxError — a harness frame() was silently replaced by the page's frame() and
failed six tests on a type error a long way from the cause.

Manual checks 1.11 and 11.13 are what is left for a person: that a real contextmenu
event reaches a capture listener, that no native menu is drawn once it is
prevented, and that xterm's real paste() brackets. 11.13 also records what is
unverified — whether Android's WebView delivers a pointer's secondary click as a
contextmenu event at all. ClipboardReader is wired on that head regardless,
because the alternative is a head where the paste half silently does nothing and
nobody finds out; that head is not compiled here either, this machine having no
android workload.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
laurensandClaude Opus 5 committed 2026-08-25 14:46:36 +02:00
1 parent 2810f7c12b
commit 1908189100
16 files changed
+1557 -22

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@@ -86,7 +86,13 @@ public sealed partial class DodoSshApp : Avalonia.Application
var shell = new PhoneShell();
var viewModel = ComposeShell(
paths, caches, workspace, knownHosts, connections, ClipboardWriter(shell));
paths,
caches,
workspace,
knownHosts,
connections,
ClipboardWriter(shell),
ClipboardReader(shell));
shell.DataContext = viewModel;
@@ -176,6 +182,26 @@ public sealed partial class DodoSshApp : Avalonia.Application
}
};
/// <summary>Reads this phone's clipboard.</summary>
/// <remarks>
/// <para>
/// The other direction, looked up per call for the same reason and with the same fall-through. One
/// caller: the terminal's right-click paste, which the renderer cannot serve itself — see
/// <c>TerminalClientOpcode.ClipboardPaste</c>.
/// </para>
/// <para>
/// Wired on this head although a phone has no right button, and not for symmetry: this head runs the same
/// renderer page, and a device with a mouse, a trackpad case or a desktop dock has a secondary click.
/// Whether Android's WebView delivers one as a DOM <c>contextmenu</c> event is unverified — see
/// <c>docs/manual-checks.md</c> 11.13 — and leaving this out in the meantime would make the paste half
/// the one thing that worked on one head and silently did nothing on the other.
/// </para>
/// </remarks>
private static Func<Task<string?>> ClipboardReader(Visual surface) =>
async () => TopLevel.GetTopLevel(surface) is { Clipboard: { } clipboard }
? await clipboard.TryGetTextAsync().ConfigureAwait(false)
: null;
/// <remarks>
/// Split from <see cref="Compose"/> only for length. The division is a real one though: above this is
/// the platform graph, and below it is the shell every head shares.
@@ -186,7 +212,8 @@ public sealed partial class DodoSshApp : Avalonia.Application
TerminalWorkspace workspace,
VaultKnownHostStore knownHosts,
SshNetConnectionFactory connections,
Func<string, Task> copyToClipboard)
Func<string, Task> copyToClipboard,
Func<Task<string?>> readClipboard)
{
// Difference 3: the Android keystore, with a fingerprint or the device credential releasing the
// key. A straight implementation of the interface the session layer has always taken.
@@ -236,6 +263,7 @@ public sealed partial class DodoSshApp : Avalonia.Application
deviceName: PhoneEnvironment.DeviceName,
copyToClipboard: copyToClipboard,
readClipboard: readClipboard,
updates: updates);