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Comment by ytjohn | Hacker News Reader

So that's what that is. I encounter that quite a bit when I try to paste and get annoyed trying to figure out how those extra characters got in there. I then would go and edit the start and stop of the line to remove them. I never actually tried just pressing enter for what looked like garbage at the start and end of the string.

I've seen it as a frustrating annoyance. Now that I know what it is, maybe I'll try hitting enter next time.

I think though, if a terminal (like iterm and windows terminal preview) was just going to enable this by default, they should have included some dialog the first time or two it happened. Something to explain what was going on.

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Terminal emulators typically only enable it in response to a request from an application. I’m not aware of one that enables paste bracketing by default.

If some shell or other line editor turns it on and doesn’t actually support the bracketing sequences, or fails to turn it off when leaving an interactive editing context, it might be worth filing that as a bug on that shell or line editor.

It could save a couple bytes for those on both ends to change the spec and enable it by default :)

It should do the opposite - find out when you run a program that doesn't support it and very strongly recommend you to use programs that support bracketed paste.

The mac now defaults to zsh which it seems to default to supporting it.

bash also has had this feature for something like six or seven years and it has been the default for almost two, so this isn't a reason to use or be specifically excited about zsh. (Of course, the ridiculously ancient copy of bash macOS ships as part of their protest against Free Software does not have this feature; we thereby need to be careful not to attribute anything to "now uses zsh/clang/etc." that was actually due to Apple holding us all back.)

> ridiculously ancient copy of bash macOS ships as part of their protest against Free Software does not have this feature

Well, bash changed their license from GPLv2 to GPLv3. So it is reasonable anyone who was using the old version would reconsider.

> that was actually due to Apple holding us all back

I know Apple does this and that their policy also unreasonably extends to GPLv2, but the GPLv3 really is difficult even for people who only want to write open source code unless they buy into everything GNU.

Yeah, 10 years ago I used to love Richard Stallman and free-as-in-freedom and all that, but over the years it started to dawn on me that free software isn't really the solution to the worlds problems.... Plus, the GNU license does it in a really adversarial way. I actually have started to avoid GNU software in general, so I'm not forced to buy into this copyleft religion if I ever wanna look under the hood. I'll be the first to say Apple does some pretty messed up stuff but avoiding GNU is not one of those things. It's been 40 years. If Richard Stallman was right then we would be in a free software utopia right now.

I don't think you understand the spirit of the GNU license. The idea is to contribute your sources back to the community so that it can be built upon. Ultimately one individual can do only so much, but allowing the community to extend and improve upon derivatives allows us to stand upon each others' shoulders and build higher order software that is otherwise beyond the individual. There is nothing really adversarial about this idea.

You should also understand that utopia is an imaginary construct of perfection, and by that definition there will never be a utopia for anything, ever. It's in fact the detractors of the free software movement who claimed that it was utopian, in the sense that it can never be achieved. The fact that GPL is the most widely used license for open source software today means it has easily quelled those claims.

I also don't know whether you realize that linux is GPL licensed. If you're set out to avoid linux in this day and age, especially as a programmer, that's quite something indeed.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.

I discovered this when I upgraded bash shell to the latest version (5.0) with HomeBrew on my Mac machine. This in turn used the readline 8.0 library that had the bracketed paste feature enabled by default. I had to `set enable-bracketed-paste off` in my .inputrc to revert back to previous behavior.

I also get it all the time in windows terminal and got annoyed at having to manually removed the characters.

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