Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?
Cursor CLI
Describe the Bug
Pasting an image directly from the clipboard (captured with cmd+shift+ctrl+4) doesn’t work on MacOS. I’ve made sure the shell integration is installed with agent install-shell-integration and I’m on the latest version of the CLI.
It DOES work if you save the image to an actual file first, then copy that and paste, but that is unfortunately much slower than pasting directly after the screenshot.
I suspect that the CLI is essentially looking for an “empty paste” when pasting directly from the clipboard (a paste with no text, but which still has the beginning and ending escape codes) so it can then try to read the image from the clipboard, and that the reason saving to a file and then copying works is that MacOS will put the file path in the clipboard, in which case there IS text and it can then just detect that it’s a path to an image (presumably by extension or something?) and read the image contents.
The reason the “empty paste” doesn’t work is that, in most terminals, pasting JUST an image doesn’t actually result in an empty paste. It just doesn’t send anything to stdin (not even then beginning and ending escape codes), so the CLI’s paste behavior never even triggers begin with and you end up just typing a v into the input.
I’m assuming this is why most agentic CLIs instead use ctrl+v for image pasting, since you can then wire up ctrl+v to forcibly trigger an actual empty paste and then let the existing codepath do its thing.
Obviously, I don’t know for sure, but that’s my best guess at least!
I’m using Ghostty but have also tried in Terminal.
Steps to Reproduce
Screenshot something with cmd+shift+ctrl+4 (so no file is saved to Desktop), cmd+v in agent’s input. No image is pasted. A v will instead get typed into the input.
Expected Behavior
agent should have the ability to handle image pastes directly from the clipboard
Operating System
MacOS
Version Information
❯ agent about
About Cursor CLI
CLI Version 2026.03.30-a5d3e17
Model GPT-5.4 1M
OS darwin (arm64)
Terminal ghostty
Shell zsh
Does this stop you from using Cursor
Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor