Getting strange characters when pasting into my iterm2 terminal

Question

I'm using iterm2 v 3.0.15 on Mac Sierra. I'm having trouble cutting and pasting from other places (e.g. text on a web page) into my terminal. For instance, I highlight some text from a web page, press Command + C, go to the terminal, and then press Command + V, I get

localhost:myproject nataliab$ 00~on the next01~

Notice the "00~" and "01~" in front of and behind my text. I do not see these characters when I cut and paste into a text editor or other places. How do I eliminate these special characters from appearing when I cut and paste into my iterm2 terminal?

Arjun Sankarlal · Answer 1 · 2020-01-07T06:44:07.983

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In the terminal window type reset, and press enter. And now, try pasting contents in terminal, it should work properly.

edited Jan 07 '20 at 06:44

answered Jul 15 '19 at 06:48

Arjun Sankarlal

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This is simple but powerful answer. By the way, `⌘+R` is shortcut for `reset` command in iTerm2, so just press `⌘+R`. – kangbu Jan 07 '20 at 01:16
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This solution does help, but any idea what caused this problem? – Vivek Oct 18 '21 at 10:27
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I can confirm that this works, but how come? – Player1 Oct 22 '21 at 08:45
this is the only working solution. thanks a lot – Mgreg Apr 21 '22 at 07:23
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Also curious as to why this worked, but it did! thanks – Jessica Feb 06 '23 at 21:27
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When I most recently got this behavior, it was after I hit ^C during tab completion in Fish, which seems to use some fancy color and positioning stuff. Presumably this left the terminal in an unusual mode, but `reset` / ⌘-R brought it back to its default mode. – amacleod Jul 07 '23 at 15:06
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@amacleod Even I got this problem and the terminal showed a message on the banner which says something like `'Unexpected exit has left the paste bracketing turned on. Do you want to switch it off'` I opted yes and the issue is gone. I believe `reset` do the same trick to bring back stability – SrinR Aug 23 '23 at 05:38

score 61 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 04 '19 at 15:41

61

To permanently disable bracketing paste mode, open the Preference, search "bracketing", uncheck "Terminal may enable paste bracketing"

answered Sep 04 '19 at 15:41

Jianwu Chen

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This is under Preferences > Profiles > Terminal > [x] "Terminal may enable paste bracketing" – Ben Dec 18 '19 at 20:52
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Excellent. As I can not foresee any need to ever want to use bracketed pasting, I like this permanent solution. Thanks. – inspirednz Jul 22 '20 at 00:32
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This feature is hot garbage, who would want this on by default? – Ian Smith Dec 16 '21 at 20:06
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This should be the accepted answer. Nobody should ever use that "feature". – Ecuador May 16 '23 at 15:26

score 58 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

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Solution in my case:

Paste printf '\e[?2004l' to the iTerm2 terminal and press enter afterwards.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Aug 09 '18 at 10:23

whiletrue

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Is this the kind of thing that can be added to `PS1` somehow in such a way that you guarantee that you're always in bracketed paste mode? – jdotjdot Mar 20 '19 at 20:57
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Can you explain what exactly this does, and why it fixes the problem? Helping people understand the issue is crucial to learning, just giving us the answer helps in the short term but doesn't increase the asker's understanding. – Bryson Jun 25 '19 at 16:34
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While yes, this fixes the problem, what is especially amusing is that this cannot be pasted into Mac's terminal; you have to type it over. It blows my mind that standard keyboard input doesn't work on Mac in 2019. – Paul Lammertsma Jul 18 '19 at 20:50
@PaulLammertsma yes it can be pasted both into iTerm2 and Terminal – whiletrue Jul 19 '19 at 09:24
@Bryson see jdotjdot's answer, which I believe is the most reasonable to your question – whiletrue Jul 19 '19 at 09:24
After you paste this in iTerm don't forget to remove 00~ from beginning and 01~ from the end manually :) – Bakul G Oct 24 '19 at 18:44
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This command disables "bracketed paste mode". See [explanation](https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard/issues/31#issuecomment-55966569). See [other answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/50454690/39396). – Carl G Nov 05 '19 at 19:09

score 14 · Answer 4 · answered May 08 '19 at 18:17

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I think it's a bracketed paste issue

Edit -> Paste special -> Advanced Paste
Uncheck "Bracketed paste mode"
Restart the terminal

answered May 08 '19 at 18:17

user3429211

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This is the actual solution here – Addo Solutions Dec 20 '19 at 18:38
Indeed - that worked for me as well. I'm wondering how this option gets enabled. Is there a shortcut key for it – Francis Martens May 30 '21 at 08:24
As of 2023 this isn't the solution since the UI seems to have changed. The answer by Jianwu Chen is the right one. – ankush981 Aug 12 '23 at 04:15

score 12 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 18 '17 at 20:44

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I had the same issue, and was unable to figure out why the problem was happening, but closing iTerm2 with Command + Q and reopening it fixed the problem.

answered Sep 18 '17 at 20:44

Robert Sigler

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That's a big hammer. You can fix it with `printf '\e[?2004h'`. – dbenhur May 21 '18 at 18:32
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@dbenhur, your comment is also a big hammer. Where to put your suggested command? – whiletrue Aug 09 '18 at 10:19
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@Fábio, ...eh? "Big hammer" colloquially means you're fixing something using too much force (and might be breaking other things at the same time). I don't see how that applies to dbenhur's comment, which is much more focused and nuanced. – Charles Duffy Jul 24 '19 at 21:59

score 7 · Answer 6 · answered May 21 '18 at 18:31

I recently started encountering this behavior in iterm2 as well. Killing and restarting a session fixes it, but loses context. I found this comment about bracketed paste mode and tried printf '\e[?2004h' to exit bracketed paste mode and repair the terminal and it worked well for me.

score 7 · Answer 7 · answered Jul 04 '19 at 12:43

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$ printf '\e[?2004l'

It solved my issue. but the funny part is when i pasted the above command, it also pasted as below

00~printf '\e[?2004l'01~

answered Jul 04 '19 at 12:43

Ram Patro

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score 3 · Answer 8 · answered Sep 21 '17 at 01:08

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Adding set t_BE= to .vimrc to disable bracketed paste mode should fix this. you may refer: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5698

answered Sep 21 '17 at 01:08

Kun Zhao

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score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Aug 09 '19 at 16:55

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I can't guarantee the conditions of this fix because I had been fiddling for a while with the solutions above, but what fixed the issue for me was to go to:

iTerm2 → Preferences → Keys → double-clic to edit the target of ⌘v → Under Speed, set Chuck Size to 256B and Interchunck delay to 100ms.

answered Aug 09 '19 at 16:55

n.caillou

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This worked for me. I set iTerm2 -> Preferences -> Advanced/Pasteboard -> "Number of bytes to paste in each chunk when pasting normally" to 256 (a fresh install of iterm2 v. 3.3.9 had that value set to 667). I upped the value for '...when pasting slowly' to 64 from 16. I did not disable bracketed paste mode (wasn't haven't the 00, 01 append issues). My original issue was pasting from vsCode to iTerm2 running python 3 (on OSX 10.15.4) was including bizarre partial and multiple duplication of the pasted chunk. Anyway, this appears to have solved. Will update if that behavior returns. Thanks! – Connor Dibble Apr 21 '20 at 22:55

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered May 29 '20 at 06:49

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I had to do shell-->Hard Reset to make it work immediately

answered May 29 '20 at 06:49

logan

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score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jan 29 '23 at 18:00

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In my case, the issue was that I was pasting a string with an em dash (sometimes called long dash, m-rule or mutton, this one: "—"), and it was messing everything up. Try pasting "ciao — amore" to your iTerm.

answered Jan 29 '23 at 18:00

sekmo

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score -1 · Answer 12 · edited Apr 01 '20 at 19:12

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printf '\e[?2004h' should solve the issue; also make sure to remove the trailing and starting junk characters.

edited Apr 01 '20 at 19:12

M--

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answered Mar 31 '20 at 11:57

Sahil

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Getting strange characters when pasting into my iterm2 terminal

12 Answers12

Solution in my case:

Linked