pi-power-paste

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OpenCode-grade clipboard paste for pi on Windows.

| Clipboard content | What you get | |---|---| | Image (screenshot, copied image) | [#image 1] placeholder + real image attachment sent to the model | | Files copied in Explorer (Ctrl+C) | Image files → [#image N] attachments; text files → collapsed [paste #N +X lines] blocks (full content sent at submit); binaries/folders → plain path | | Large text (>3 lines or >1000 chars) | Collapsed [paste #N +X lines] marker, expanded at submit | | Small text | Inserted as-is |

Two extras that make it feel native:

• Persistent PowerShell clipboard helper — pi core spawns a cold PowerShell (~500ms) for every clipboard image read; power-paste keeps one alive and answers in ~5-10ms.
• Ctrl+V that actually works — registered through pi's Kitty-protocol-aware shortcut layer (see Windows Terminal setup below). Alt+V (pi's default image-paste binding) also works out of the box.

Built on top of pi-paster (MIT) — it is bundled as a library (placeholder store, editor, image optimizer, preview widgets); its own extension is not loaded.

Installation

pi install npm:pi-power-paste

Or try it without installing:

pi -e npm:pi-power-paste

Windows Terminal Ctrl+V setup

Windows Terminal binds Ctrl+V to its own "paste text" action, so the key never reaches pi (or any other TUI app). Symptoms: Ctrl+V does nothing for images; Win+V → Enter doesn't work either. Fix — unbind it in WT's settings.json:

"actions": [
    { "command": "unbound", "keys": "ctrl+v" }
]

WT hot-reloads the file, no restart needed. PowerShell's own PSReadLine still pastes with Ctrl+V, and right-click paste keeps working, so the trade-off is minimal.

Notes:

• Both stable and Preview WT have separate settings files — edit the one you actually run (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal[Preview]_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json).
• VS Code integrated terminal intercepts Ctrl+V too; unbind workbench.action.terminal.paste for terminalFocus if you want it there.
• Without any of this, Alt+V still gives you the full power-paste flow.

Commands

• /power-paste — live self-test: probes the clipboard and reports helper mode (persistent helper vs one-shot fallback), latency, clipboard content kind, and pending attachment count.

How it works

• One PowerShell process (-STA -NoExit) is spawned lazily on first paste; each probe is a single-line script over stdin with a sentinel-delimited reply (WinForms clipboard API: GetFileDropList → files, GetImage → PNG bytes, GetText → text). If it dies or times out, a one-shot spawnSync probe takes over — paste never breaks.
• Images become [#image N] placeholders with real attachments (optimized before send), text/file content uses pi's native [paste #N] collapsing so blocks are atomic-deletable and expanded at submit.
• Ctrl+V matching goes through pi.registerShortcut — with the Kitty keyboard protocol active (Windows Terminal 1.22+), Ctrl+V arrives as a CSI-u sequence, not \x16. Matching raw bytes is a trap.

Requirements

• Windows for the full experience; on macOS/Linux the extension degrades to pi-paster's original clipboard-image behavior.
• Windows Terminal users: the Ctrl+V unbind above (or just use Alt+V).

Credits

• pi-paster by beowulf11 (MIT) — attachment store, editor base, image pipeline. Bundled as a library; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for its license text.
• Built with pi.

License

MIT