paste-view

paste-view lets you see the text behind Claude Code’s [Pasted text #N +X lines] placeholder before you send it: each paste gets a preview line above the prompt and opens whole in a pane, and pasted images get thumbnails. Without a mod, the quickest way to see a collapsed paste is to paste the same text again, which expands it in the prompt.

At a glance

• What it does: previews of pasted text and thumbnails of pasted images above the prompt, instead of bare [Pasted text #2] and [Image #1] tags.
• Where: in the terminal, on macOS or Linux. Thumbnails need Ghostty or kitty, or iTerm2 with one setting.
• Cost: no tokens, no network calls, nothing written to disk. It reads your clipboard once per text paste.
• For: anyone who pastes logs, stack traces or specs into Claude Code and wants to check them before sending.

What [Pasted text #N +X lines] means

When you paste more than 800 characters or more than three lines, Claude Code keeps the prompt box usable by folding the paste into a placeholder. N is the paste’s number and X counts the lines after the first, so [Pasted text #7 +41 lines] is your seventh paste, 42 lines long. A single long line shows as [Pasted text #7], with no count.

Nothing is lost: when you press Enter, Claude receives the full text, marked as pasted rather than typed.

How to see pasted text without a mod

• Paste again. Right after a paste collapses, Claude Code shows paste again to expand for a few seconds. Paste the same clipboard content a second time and the placeholder turns into the full text, which you can read and edit in the prompt. It works for your most recent paste, while the clipboard still holds it. Issue #91551 reports the catch: the same paste minutes later, anywhere in the prompt, expands the old placeholder instead of inserting text at the cursor.
• After sending. Claude Code keeps the content behind each placeholder under ~/.claude/paste-cache/. That is how a prompt you bring back with the Up arrow resends the full text, even in a later session. Files there are deleted after cleanupPeriodDays.
• No off switch. There is no documented setting that stops pastes from collapsing. The request for one, issue #23134, is open with more than 50 comments, several from people who dictate by voice. For whole files or long logs, the docs suggest saving the content to a file and asking Claude to read it.

What paste-view adds

Above the prompt, paste-view draws:

• Pasted text becomes one line with its number, line count, size and first line, for example #7 · 42 lines · 3.1k chars followed by the opening words.
• The whole paste opens on demand. Click its line, or press ctrl+x tab then its number, and it opens in a pane titled Pasted text #7. The arrow keys scroll it, Esc closes it, and your draft stays as it was.
• Pasted images become thumbnails labelled with their number. Each keeps its shape, and the row shrinks to fit the space above the prompt.
• Images that can’t be drawn show as a line with their size or format. Click it to open the file in your system’s image viewer.
• Previews clear when you send the prompt or delete the placeholder.

The pane shows a paste; it doesn’t let you edit it. To fix a word inside a collapsed paste, expand it with the paste-again trick.

image-view draws the same kind of thumbnails for pasted images. paste-view adds the previews of pasted text, the pane that shows a paste whole, and, where thumbnails can’t be drawn, image lines that open the picture instead of the bare [Image #n] text.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later on macOS or Linux. Thumbnails need a terminal that draws pictures (see the next section), and on Linux text previews need wl-clipboard or xclip.

claude plugin marketplace add Amorfx/claude-paste-view
claude plugin install paste-view@claude-paste-view

Most Linux distributions don’t install the clipboard tools by default. On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt install wl-clipboard xclip

The repository is called claude-paste-view; the plugin it installs is paste-view, version 0.1.0. Run /reload-plugins in an open session, or start a new one, then paste an image or a long block of text.

Which terminals show thumbnails

Text previews work in any terminal. Thumbnails depend on the terminal and on Claude Code’s own rules for drawing pictures:

• Ghostty and kitty draw them with no setup.
• iTerm2 can draw them, but Claude Code doesn’t recognise it as a terminal that does. Thumbnails appear once CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_TERMINAL_IMAGES is set.
• tmux, screen and background sessions get no thumbnails, even inside Ghostty or kitty, because Claude Code turns pictures off there. If your terminal passes the kitty graphics protocol through tmux, add "env": { "CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_TERMINAL_IMAGES": "1" } to ~/.claude/settings.json and start a new session.
• Terminal.app, VS Code’s terminal and others list images as lines that open them.

For iTerm2, the README suggests this line in ~/.zshrc or your shell profile, then a new session:

[ "$TERM_PROGRAM" = "iTerm.app" ] && export CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_TERMINAL_IMAGES=1

Keep the TERM_PROGRAM check: in a terminal that can’t draw pictures, the variable leaves images with neither a thumbnail nor a line to open them.

Only PNG images become thumbnails. A pasted JPEG or WebP is always a line, #1 · image · jpg, that opens the file.

How it works

The mod hooks three events. session.start reads a few environment variables (TERM, TERM_PROGRAM, KITTY_WINDOW_ID, TMUX, STY and two of Claude Code’s own) to decide whether the terminal can draw pictures. It then starts a timer that reads the prompt box every 200 ms and looks for image and pasted-text placeholders; it polls because a paste raises no edit event. ui.render draws the previews above the prompt and the pane, and ui.close notices when you close the pane.

For text, there is no file to read: Claude Code keeps a collapsed paste to itself until you send the prompt, and the mod API doesn’t pass it to mods either (issue #100443). So when a new text placeholder appears, the mod reads your clipboard once, with pbpaste, wl-paste or xclip. It keeps that text only if its line count matches the placeholder, holds it in memory, and drops it when the placeholder leaves the prompt.

For images, it lists Claude Code’s temp directory (CLAUDE_CODE_TMPDIR, or /tmp/claude-<your user id>, built with one id -u) to find the session’s cached pastes. It reads the first bytes of each PNG for its size, and Claude Code’s Image element draws the thumbnail. Opening an image line runs uname once, then open on macOS or xdg-open on Linux.

It makes no network calls, writes nothing to disk and adds nothing to Claude’s context.

What people say

• In the repo’s first issue, an Ubuntu user saw no preview (clipboard changed) on every text paste. The cause was a missing wl-clipboard; since a fix on Oct 12, the line names the tool to install instead.
• In the same thread, kitty drew no thumbnail for a pasted JPEG. The author chose not to convert images through ImageMagick, to keep the mod light.
• A contributor’s pull request showed thumbnails working in iTerm2 3.7.3 with the forced-images setting, which the README now documents.

Limitations

• Terminal only. The code draws nothing on other surfaces.
• Text previews come from the clipboard. If the clipboard changes within about 200 ms of the paste, or the paste didn’t come from it (a tmux buffer, a remote session over SSH), the line says no preview instead of showing the wrong text. A draft restored from history with several text placeholders gets no previews.
• The placeholder formats and the image cache path are Claude Code internals. The author warns that a later version may change them and asks for an issue if previews stop appearing.