PasteGuard: TUI paste guard

Stops multi-line text from being truncated into accidental commands when pasted into terminal TUIs

Problem

Programmers on Windows write a 10-line plan in Notepad or an editor and Ctrl+Shift+V it into a TUI like Claude CLI, only to have one line silently turned into a hard return mid-paste, sending half the instruction; even routing through Notepad reproduces it, and the break location looks random, making it painful to debug.

Solution

A lightweight clipboard middleware: before pasting, normalize the Windows clipboard (unify newlines, merge stray CRs from Word/UltraEdit) and wrap it in the bracketed-paste protocol; after pasting, verify the send buffer and warn/restore on unexpected hard returns. Ship as a standalone tray tool and optionally a VS Code extension.

Users

Developers and writers on Windows who drive CLI/TUI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc.)

MVP

Watch clipboard changes and log plain-text length and newline positions; one-click normalize clipboard to LF and write back; detect whether the target window is in bracketed-paste mode and show a pre-paste checklist; restore from history buffer and alert on truncation

Revenue

One-time desktop license ($9–19) or open source with sponsorships; a team edition with shared config and audit logs

Why now

AI coding agents rely heavily on TUI interaction, and Windows terminal paste quirks keep coming up in communities with no dedicated lightweight fix