Smart Paste: stripping terminal noise before pasting, with one hotkey

The pain

Half of my work happens in a terminal — Claude Code, logs, utility output, tabular views, progress bars, spinners. Constantly I want to grab a chunk of that output and paste it somewhere else: into the IDE, a ticket, a chat, a doc.

Every time, the same ritual.

I select a line from claude code or kubectl get, copy, paste — and in the IDE/ticket I get:

│ src/auth/middleware.ts:42
│  function validateToken(token)
│    if (token.exp < Date.now())
└─────────────────────────────────

Then the cleanup starts. Drop the leading vertical bars │. Drop the bottom border └─. Drop the trailing whitespace — there's a wagon-load of it, because the terminal pads lines to column width. Drop ANSI escape sequences when the source was less tidy. Sometimes fish out invisible zero-width characters that quietly break JSON parsing or regex matching downstream.

It's 10–30 seconds each time. Tolerable. But I do this dozens of times a day. On long blocks of text, cleaning bars line by line by hand is minutes, and each pass is faintly nauseating.

With Claude Code the pain is especially loud: tool-output blocks draw frames, progress runs spinners from Braille (⠋⠙⠹⠸), status bars are stuffed with block elements █▌▏░ for progress meters. Copy an answer — and the clean markdown ends up full of debris.

The fix

A Raycast Script Command that:

Reads the current clipboard via pbpaste
Pipes through perl -CSD (this matters — macOS sed mishandles UTF-8 multibyte characters; perl with the -CSD flag does Unicode correctly)
Strips noise with regex by Unicode ranges
Writes back to the clipboard via pbcopy
Synthesizes Cmd+V via osascript — pastes into the active app

One hotkey instead of manual cleanup.

What gets stripped

The regex hits ranges, not specific characters — broader coverage, more resilient:

What	Unicode range	Why
ANSI escape sequences	`\x1b\[...m`	color codes from `ls --color`, `grep --color`, `bat`, etc.
Box-drawing	`U+2500–U+257F`	frames `│ ├ └ ─ ┌ ┐ ╔ ╗ ║ ═` of every flavour
Block elements	`U+2580–U+259F`	progress bars `█ ▌ ▏ ░ ▒ ▓`
Braille patterns	`U+2800–U+28FF`	Claude Code spinners `⠋ ⠙ ⠹ ⠸ ⠼`
Zero-width	`U+200B–U+200D, U+FEFF`	invisible ZWSP, ZWNJ, ZWJ, BOM
Trailing whitespace	`[ \t]+$`	trailing spaces and tabs at line ends

The leading border gets a separate, careful pass: s/^[\x{2500}-\x{257F}]+[ \t]?//mg strips the border together with one separator space after it. Otherwise │ code, after removing │, would keep an orphan leading space — and indentation in the IDE would drift.

What is not touched: bullets •, arrows → ← ↑ ↓, emoji, Cyrillic, normal code indentation. That's meaning, not debris.

The final script

~/raycast-scripts/smart-paste.sh:

#!/bin/bash
 
# @raycast.schemaVersion 1
# @raycast.title Smart Paste
# @raycast.mode silent
# @raycast.icon ✨
# @raycast.packageName Clipboard
# @raycast.description Strip box-drawing, spinners, progress bars, ANSI escapes, zero-width chars and trailing whitespace from the clipboard, then paste
 
pbpaste | \
  perl -CSD -pe '
    s/\x1b\[[0-9;?]*[a-zA-Z]//g;
    s/^[\x{2500}-\x{257F}]+[ \t]?//mg;
    s/[\x{2500}-\x{257F}\x{2580}-\x{259F}\x{2800}-\x{28FF}]//g;
    s/[\x{200B}-\x{200D}\x{FEFF}]//g;
    s/[ \t]+$//mg;
  ' | \
  pbcopy
 
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "v" using command down'

Wiring it up

Raycast:

Add ~/raycast-scripts/ as a Script Directory in Raycast settings (Extensions → Script Commands → +)
Bind a hotkey. Mine is ⌘⌥B (cmd + option + b)
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility → enable Raycast (required for osascript keystroke)

Stream Deck: on every profile I pinned a button in the top-right corner — System → Open pointing at the script path. Now both a keyboard hotkey and a one-press deck button do the same thing. Stream Deck also needs its own Accessibility permission in Privacy & Security.

Outcome

A 30-second manual ritual replaced by one keystroke. On long pastes out of Claude Code or kubectl, the savings are larger — line-by-line border cleanup by hand was honest suffering.

If anyone wants to tweak it — the ranges in the regex extend trivially. For example, if you copy a lot of markdown tables and want to keep | (that's ASCII U+007C, not box-drawing — it does not live in 2500–257F, so the script doesn't touch it) — nothing to do. If conversely you want to drop ASCII pipes too — add s/^\|//mg or similar.

Right now it covers all my cases. If some new artifact ever leaks out of Claude Code, a range gets added with a single line.