copy-that

Clipboard and scrollback tools that follow you anywhere — the same commands work in tmux and Ghostty, on your own machine and over SSH.

The headline act is an alias:

alias copy-that="capture-pane | pick-cmd | pbcopy"

Type copy-that, fzf-pick any command you've already run, and its full output lands on your clipboard — even when your clipboard is three SSH hops away. Alias it to something shorter; mine is two letters.

The deep dive — how each stage hides a difference between terminals and hosts — is in this post; the backstory of leaving tmux is in this one.

capture-pane

Dumps the terminal's scrollback, visible screen included, to stdout. Uses tmux capture-pane -pS - inside tmux and the AppleScript bridge in Ghostty.

pick-cmd

Splits a scrollback dump (stdin or file argument) into command blocks — command, output, duration — and presents them in fzf: newest first, multi-select, full-block preview. Picked blocks print to stdout. (pick-cmd --list skips fzf and prints just the parsed command lines — handy for checking markers.)

Boundaries are matched with prompt markers. The defaults expect a starship prompt where every command line starts with ❯ and the next prompt opens with a 󱞩 duration line:

[character]
success_symbol = '[❯](bold green)'
error_symbol = '[❯](bold red)'

[cmd_duration]
format = '󱞩 [$duration]($style) '
min_time = 0

min_time = 0 is required: the closing marker must follow every command, or fast commands are silently dropped from the picker.

Different prompt? Set PICK_CMD_PROMPT_START (regex; group 1 captures the command text) and PICK_CMD_PROMPT_END (regex; marks the line that closes a command's output). Both are matched at the start of each line. If no line reliably closes every command's output, set PICK_CMD_PROMPT_END='' — blocks then end at the next command line instead. Or skip the regex-writing entirely and let copy-that-init (below) work them out.

osc52

Copies stdin to your local system clipboard from anywhere — over SSH, inside tmux, both at once — via an OSC 52 escape sequence: your terminal emulator does the clipboard write, so no X11 forwarding is involved. Inside tmux, passthrough must be enabled (it's off by default since tmux 3.3 and fails silently):

set -g allow-passthrough on

To make the copy-that alias work unchanged on machines without a real pbcopy, polyfill it:

(( $+commands[pbcopy] )) || alias pbcopy=osc52

copy-that-init

Don't want to write the marker regexes yourself? copy-that-init infers them from your actual terminal: it captures a scrollback sample, checks whether the current markers already parse it, and only then asks an LLM CLI to propose new ones — each proposal is validated by running the real parser on your sample and confirmed by you, and the result is printed as ready-to-paste export lines.

copy-that-init                   # capture the live terminal (tmux or Ghostty)
copy-that-init --file dump.txt   # or use a saved scrollback

It shells out to whatever LLM CLI you already have — claude -p, codex exec, and llm are auto-detected, in that order; set COPY_THAT_LLM for anything else that reads a prompt on stdin (e.g. COPY_THAT_LLM='ollama run llama3.2' for fully local inference). No API keys are handled, and nothing is sent until it shows you the exact sample and you say yes — scrollback can contain secrets, so read it first.

pane-words.zsh

A zsh library (sourced, not run) that feeds the scrollback back into tab completion: any word already on screen — filenames, hashes, hostnames, flags, path components — becomes a completion candidate, captured via capture-pane so it works in tmux and Ghostty alike. It also binds Ctrl+] to an fzf picker over the same words for when you'd rather fuzzy-search than tab.

source /path/to/copy-that/pane-words.zsh

Note it sets the completer chain wholesale (_expand_alias _complete _ignored _pane_words_completer, so pane words only kick in when nothing else matches). If you already customize zstyle ':completion:*' completer, append _pane_words_completer to your own chain instead of sourcing the zstyle line as-is.

Install

Symlink the scripts somewhere on your PATH — e.g. ~/.local/bin:

git clone https://github.com/junzh0u/copy-that.git
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s "$PWD"/copy-that/capture-pane "$PWD"/copy-that/pick-cmd \
      "$PWD"/copy-that/osc52 "$PWD"/copy-that/copy-that-init ~/.local/bin/

(~/.local/bin isn't on PATH everywhere — add export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to your shell rc if it isn't.)

pane-words.zsh isn't a command — source it from your .zshrc instead (see above).

Requirements: zsh (capture-pane, pane-words.zsh), POSIX sh (osc52), Python 3 — stdlib only — for pick-cmd and copy-that-init, fzf for pick-cmd and the pane-words Ctrl+] widget, and an LLM CLI only if you use copy-that-init. Capturing needs tmux, or Ghostty on macOS.

License

MIT