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Bracketed paste (DECSET 2004)
ESC [ ? 2004 hBracketed paste mode wraps pasted text in special escape sequences so applications can distinguish pasted content from typed input. Enable with
ESC [ ? 2004 h. When active, pasted text is bracketed between ESC [ 200 ~ (start) and ESC [ 201 ~ (end).
This is a security feature: without bracketed paste, pasting text containing newlines into a shell prompt would immediately execute commands. With bracketed paste, the shell can treat the entire paste as literal text. This also enables editors to handle paste correctly — vim can enter paste mode automatically, preserving indentation rather than auto-indenting each line.
Widely adopted. Most modern shells (bash, zsh, fish) and editors (vim, emacs) enable bracketed paste by default.How this is testedautomated
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\x1b[?2004h (DECSET 2004), verify bracketedPaste mode is active.The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-04-06
Supported by 13 of 14 backends (93%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | DECRPM: mode reset |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | DECRPM: mode reset |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |