peekaboo paste

paste sends Cmd+V. With no payload, it pastes the current clipboard contents. With text, a file, an image, or base64 data, it becomes an atomic “clipboard + Cmd+V + restore” helper: temporarily replace the system clipboard with your payload, paste into the target, then restore the previous clipboard contents (or clear it if it was empty).

This reduces drift by collapsing multiple CLI steps into one command. Plain text uses direct process-targeted typing in background mode. Rich/current-clipboard payloads use Cmd+V; pass --foreground when the caller needs a confirmed command result because macOS does not acknowledge whether a process-targeted Cmd+V was consumed.

#Key options

#Delivery modes

• Background is the default when Peekaboo can resolve a target. Exact-window routes pin the process generation, window ID/bounds, and focused element. App/PID routes upgrade when one eligible window exists and refuse when several are eligible. Plain text is delivered directly without touching the clipboard. Binary/rich and current-clipboard requests remain receiver-unverifiable and return “may have pasted; do not retry” after cleanup.
• Foreground (--foreground) requires a supplied target to return a confirmed exact-window focus receipt before Cmd+V. A genuinely targetless foreground call remains intentionally global. --no-auto-focus cannot be combined with a target because Peekaboo will not guess that the requested window already owns keyboard focus.
• Without an app/PID target, paste fails before mutating the clipboard. Add --foreground only when global delivery is intentional.
• Exact window selectors stay exact through text or Cmd+V dispatch; focus, owner, generation, or bounds drift fails before clipboard access whenever no event has begun. Exact-window remote delivery requires Bridge protocol 1.24.
• Process-targeted text and Cmd+V delivery retain the resolved app's process-generation receipt. Plain text revalidates before every emitted character, while clipboard-backed paste uses generation-pinned hotkey delivery. A target exit or relaunch never silently retargets the reusable PID. Remote background paste requires Bridge protocol 1.22 or newer.
• Clipboard-backed transactions are serialized across CLI, daemon, and GUI processes with a private per-user lock under ~/Library/Application Support/Peekaboo, independent of each process's temporary directory.
• Target capability checks, cancellation checks, and the prior-clipboard snapshot must all succeed before Peekaboo writes a temporary payload. A read failure is never treated as an empty clipboard; if a write fails after partially changing the pasteboard, Peekaboo restores the exact saved state before returning the error.
• Background binary/rich paste still mutates the system clipboard briefly; paste completes the noncancellable --restore-delay settle and restores the previous contents before releasing the transaction lock, even when delivery throws or the caller cancels.

#Examples

# Paste the current clipboard into the focused app
peekaboo paste --foreground

# Paste plain text into TextEdit
peekaboo paste "Hello, world" --app TextEdit

# Paste rich text (RTF) into a specific window title
peekaboo paste --data-base64 "$RTF_B64" --uti public.rtf --also-text "fallback" --app TextEdit --window-title "Untitled"

# Paste a PNG into Notes with a confirmed foreground dispatch result
peekaboo paste --file-path /tmp/snippet.png --app Notes --foreground

# Force foreground paste for apps that ignore background Cmd+V
peekaboo paste "Hello" --app TextEdit --foreground

#Notes

• File paths for --file-path accept ~/....
• Successful background text JSON reports delivery mode and target PID. Clipboard-backed background delivery returns INTERACTION_FAILED with the explicit retry-unsafe message instead of a success payload.
• After Cmd+V dispatch begins, cancellation or a delivery error is indeterminate. A clipboard restoration failure is always reported with a canonical partial or indeterminate retry-unsafe outcome, including for receiptless providers. Inspect fresh UI state rather than replaying the paste.

#Troubleshooting

• Verify Screen Recording + Accessibility permissions (peekaboo permissions status). Background paste also requires Event Synthesizing access for the sending process; request it with peekaboo permissions request event-synthesizing.
• Confirm your target with peekaboo app list, peekaboo window list, or peekaboo see before rerunning.
• Re-run with --json or --verbose to surface detailed errors.