tip: Copying from Ghostty on macOS produces garbled whitespace when pasting into Electron apps

[antonme]

Issue Description

Copying text from Ghostty tip on macOS and pasting into Electron apps (Claude.ai, Slack, VS Code, etc.) produces garbled output — whitespace is mangled (spaces replaced with newlines, or linebreaks lost entirely, depending on context).
This may be related to #9532 (Linux/Wayland clipboard issues with Electron), but the symptom and platform are different. Pasting from other terminals (Kitty, Terminal.app) into the same Electron apps works correctly.

Expected Behavior

Pasting into Electron apps preserves the original formatting, including spaces.

Actual Behavior

Whitespace is mangled — spaces are replaced with newlines in some cases, and linebreaks are lost in others. For example, copying the output of ip r and pasting into Claude.ai:

From Kitty (correct):

default via 192.168.15.1 dev en11
192.168.2.0/24 dev bridge100 scope link

From Ghostty tip (broken):

default via
192.168.15.1
 dev
en11
192.168.2.0/24
 dev
bridge100
 scope link

The issue also affects more complex output like ip a, where interface names, addresses, and flags all get split onto separate lines.

Pasting into non-Electron apps (e.g. native macOS apps) works correctly. Pasting from other terminals (Kitty, Terminal.app) into the same Electron apps also works correctly.

Reproduction Steps

1. Run Ghostty tip on macOS
2. Run any command with multi-word output (e.g. ip r, ls -la, ps aux)
3. Select and copy the output (⌘C)
4. Paste into any Electron app (Claude.ai, VS Code, Slack)
5. Observe mangled whitespace (spaces become newlines, or linebreaks are lost)

Ghostty Logs

No response

Ghostty Version

Ghostty 1.3.0-main+7f611078d

Version
  - version: 1.3.0-main+7f611078d
  - channel: tip
Build Config
  - Zig version   : 0.15.2
  - build mode    : .ReleaseFast
  - app runtime   : .none
  - font engine   : .coretext
  - renderer      : renderer.generic.Renderer(renderer.Metal)
  - libxev        : kqueue

OS Version Information

MacOS Tahoe 26.3 (25D125)

(Linux only) Display Server

None

(Linux only) Desktop Environment/Window Manager

No response

Minimal Ghostty Configuration

Default configuration — no clipboard-related settings changed

Additional Relevant Configuration

No response

I acknowledge that:

• I have reviewed the FAQ and confirm that my issue is NOT among them.
• I have searched the Ghostty repository (both open and closed Discussions and Issues) and confirm this is not a duplicate of an existing issue or discussion.
• I have checked the "Preview" tab on all text fields to ensure that everything looks right, and have wrapped all configuration and code in code blocks with a group of three backticks (```) on separate lines.

[00-kat]

Works on Linux with Discord; tagging as macOS-only.

[DonMartin76]

I can confirm that this is a problem on MacOS, e.g. when I copy/paste from GhosTTY to MS Teams (don't judge), the line breaks are lost, and it's very annoying.

[Menn1s]

Also running into this. Copying from Ghostty to Obsidian results in spaces becoming newlines.

Ghostty 1.3.1 (build 15212)
MacOS 26.4

[kambleakash0]

Same issue. I'm on Mac Air M2.

[iamlyth]

Experiencing the same issue on Linux (NixOS, Wayland, Ghostty 1.3.1 GTK build). Copying from Ghostty and pasting into certain web apps spaces become newlines. Pasting into native apps works correctly.

[AMMullan]

Ditty - if I copy multiple lines containing CSV content I expect to be able to paste it into Excel/Google Sheets and it be multiple lines but instead I get a single line of content.

I can paste it into VSCode first and then copy it from there (or pipe the output of the script into pbcopy) and it's fine but that's tedious to have to do each time.

[AMMullan]

Looks like this is all coming back to the copy on Ghostty being copied as HTML rather than Plain Text - #12971 explains this quite well. I tested this also by copying straight from ghostty and running this:

❯ osascript -e 'clipboard info'
«class utf8», 971, «class HTML», 1032, «class ut16», 1944, string, 971, Unicode text, 1942

Note the HTML class.

If I paste this into VSCode and copy it from there I get:

❯ osascript -e 'clipboard info'
«class utf8», 971, «class ut16», 1944, string, 971, Unicode text, 1942

[kambleakash0]

Interesting