CLI TUI: mouse right-click copy/paste and drag-select don't work in VTE terminals (Ptyxis/GNOME Terminal)

Cline Surface

CLI (interactive TUI, cline --tui)

Cline Version

3.0.24 (latest on npm as of 2026-06-13)

Beta version

Not a beta build. This is the current stable CLI from npm.

What happened?

Plain mouse right-click does not work for copy/paste in the CLI interactive TUI when run in a VTE-based terminal (Ptyxis / GNOME Terminal). Three related symptoms, one root cause:

1. Right-click paste does nothing in the TUI input box.
2. The terminal's own right-click context menu only appears after ~4 rapid right-clicks instead of a single click.
3. Click-drag to select text does not copy; you have to hold Shift while dragging.

I expected to be able to right-click to paste (and select-drag to copy) the way other terminal agents (e.g. Claude Code) allow, without reaching for keyboard shortcuts.

Root cause analysis:

• The TUI enables xterm mouse reporting, so the terminal forwards mouse events to Cline instead of handling them itself. VTE only returns control to its own selection/context-menu when you hold Shift (its hardcoded override), and VTE exposes no setting to ignore an application's mouse-reporting request. That explains symptoms 2 and 3.
• The TUI (built on OpenTUI) ingests paste only through bracketed-paste sequences (ESC[200~ … ESC[201~) via its stdin parser. There is no mouse-driven paste handler, so a plain right-click cannot trigger a paste even though the terminal would happily emit the clipboard. That is symptom 1. (Refs: OpenTUI paste events, input handling; same bracketed-paste fragility appears in opencode #13800 and #31470.)
• cline --help exposes no --no-mouse / disable-mouse-capture flag, so there is currently no way to opt out.

Suggested fix (either resolves it):

1. A flag or config key to disable mouse capture in the TUI, so the terminal's native right-click copy/paste and click-drag selection work.
2. A mouse-event paste handler (right-click or middle-click paste) plus in-TUI click-drag selection, for parity with the keyboard path.

Workarounds that do work (for anyone else hitting this): Shift+Insert to paste, Shift+drag then Ctrl+Shift+C to copy, Shift+right-click for the context menu. Ctrl+Shift+V is unreliable inside the TUI because the keypress is intercepted by the app in raw mode before the terminal's paste action fires.

Steps to reproduce

1. Launch the interactive TUI: cline --tui in a VTE-based terminal (Ptyxis or GNOME Terminal).
2. Copy some text from another window.
3. Right-click in the TUI input box. Nothing pastes, and the terminal's context menu does not appear on a single click (takes ~4 rapid clicks).
4. Try to select TUI output by click-dragging without Shift. Nothing is copied.

Provider/Model

AWS Bedrock (reproduces regardless of model; this is a terminal-input issue, not model-dependent).

IDE / CLI Diagnostics

cline 3.0.24

System Information

OS: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (kernel 7.0.0)
Terminal: Ptyxis (VTE 0.84.0), the default GNOME terminal on Ubuntu 26.04.
          Classic GNOME Terminal and other VTE terminals behave identically.
Shell: zsh
Node: v25
Arch: x86_64