macOS paste prefers NSURL over plain text, causing Transmit SFTP paths to paste as sftp:// URLs

[faridrashidi]

Issue Description

Opening this as a discussion per repository policy. I originally filed this as #13132, which was auto-closed because non-maintainers are asked to start with a discussion.

On macOS, copying a remote path from Panic Transmit with Cmd+C appears to put multiple representations on the pasteboard, including a plain text path and an NSURL/URL representation.

When pasting into Sublime Text, the plain path is pasted:

/vf/users/rashidimehrabf2/nextneopi/TCGA/TCGA-2Y-A9GS

When pasting the same clipboard contents into Ghostty with Cmd+V, Ghostty pastes the URL representation instead:

sftp://rashidimehrabf2@helix.nih.gov:22/vf/users/rashidimehrabf2/nextneopi/TCGA/TCGA-2Y-A9GS

This seems related to the macOS pasteboard representation ordering used by getOpinionatedStringContents() in NSPasteboard+Extension.swift, which currently tries readObjects(forClasses: [NSURL.self]) first and only falls back to .string afterwards. For non-file URLs, it returns absoluteString, so an SFTP URL wins over the plain text path.

Relevant source:

if let urls = readObjects(forClasses: [NSURL.self]) as? [URL],
   urls.count > 0 {
    return urls
        .map { $0.isFileURL ? Ghostty.Shell.escape($0.path) : $0.absoluteString }
        .joined(separator: " ")
}

return self.string(forType: .string)

Related discussion: #12519

Expected Behavior

For normal terminal paste, Ghostty should prefer the plain text representation when one exists, or provide a way to paste plain text only.

In this case, Cmd+V should paste:

/vf/users/rashidimehrabf2/nextneopi/TCGA/TCGA-2Y-A9GS

Actual Behavior

Ghostty pastes:

sftp://rashidimehrabf2@helix.nih.gov:22/vf/users/rashidimehrabf2/nextneopi/TCGA/TCGA-2Y-A9GS

Reproduction Steps

1. On macOS, connect to an SFTP server in Panic Transmit.
2. Select a remote folder or file.
3. Press Cmd+C in Transmit. This is regular Copy, not Shift+Cmd+C / Copy URL.
4. Paste into Sublime Text and observe that the pasted value is the plain remote path.
5. Paste the same clipboard contents into Ghostty with Cmd+V.
6. Observe that Ghostty pastes the sftp://user@host:port/... URL instead of the plain path.

Ghostty Logs

No logs observed yet. This appears to be deterministic pasteboard representation selection behavior.

Ghostty Version

Unknown from CLI on the machine where I am filing this; ghostty +version was not available in PATH during discussion creation.

OS Version Information

ProductName:    macOS
ProductVersion: 26.5.1
BuildVersion:   25F80

Minimal Ghostty Configuration

Reproducible with normal paste behavior; no known clipboard-related Ghostty configuration is involved.

Additional Relevant Configuration

Source application: Panic Transmit, using regular Cmd+C on a remote SFTP item.

Notes

This may be the same class of issue as #12519: Ghostty choosing a richer/non-text pasteboard representation when a plain text representation would be more appropriate for a terminal paste.

[quinncomendant]

Perhaps related: when I copy–paste an email address from LaunchBar's Contacts, it pastes into Ghostty as mailto:user@example.com.

If I copy an email address from a plain text document (e.g., TextMate) it doesn't add mailto:; so I suspect LaunchBar is providing some kind of rich-text version of the email address that causes Ghostty to add the mailto:.

Pasting from LaunchBar to most other apps (e.g., Terminal.app, TextMate.app, iA Writer.app) pastes the email without mailto:; the only other app besides Ghostty that does add it is Pages.app.

[bo2themax]

I couldn't reproduce this using LaunchBar because I didn't quite get how to use it 🫪. It should be the same RC regardless; please test the tip version once #13153 is merged.

[quinncomendant]

Yes, I can paste an email address now and Ghostty excludes mailto:. Fixed! Thanks!

[bo2themax]

#13152