Restoring keyboard-only behavior in Claude Code on macOS

26 Sep 2026

I don't use my mouse in Terminal.app on my Mac. I am used to Cmd+C and Cmd+V for copying and pasting text. It works everywhere the same, in every app on my computer — except in Claude Code CLI.

A while back, Claude Code introduced two things that have slowed me down for weeks:

Mouse tracking, which lets you use your trackpad or a mouse to click on options in a permission prompt or AskUserQuestion. Useful if you like your mouse and hate your keyboard. I did not mind this, particularly because it did not take away the keyboard option; I just had to be careful how I clicked if I was switching between windows.
copyOnSelect — defaulted to "true" when released, it allows Claude Code to automatically write everything you select to the clipboard without following up with a keyboard shortcut. Physically typing less sounds like a huge time saver, but this is the one that slowed me down the most, because no other app on my computer has this feature. When I was copying text in any other app, including a non-Claude Code terminal session, I often caught myself selecting text, assuming it was on the clipboard, then realizing it wasn't and repeating the process. Having to store this exception in my mind was occupying far too much of my time.

I initially tried fixing this problem by just turning off copyOnSelect, which lives in ~/.claude.json:

"copyOnSelect": false

That brought back the keyboard step, with one silly little wrinkle: Claude Code then only allowed me to copy text with Ctrl+C, never Cmd+C. Turns out Cmd+C only works there on terminals that support the Kitty keyboard protocol (Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, iTerm2) — Terminal.app isn't one of them, which is why I was stuck on Ctrl+C. It was still too much friction. With help from Claude, I found out that setting copyOnSelect to false was only 1 of 3 fixes to restore the keyboard behavior I was used to.

The other two settings restore Terminal.app's native mouse behavior in Claude Code, and they live in a different file: ~/.claude/settings.json:

"tui": "default",
"env": {
  "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE": "1"
}

"tui": "default" switches off the fullscreen renderer, which draws to the terminal's alternate screen and gives Claude Code its own virtualized scrollback. That's what breaks trackpad scrolling and Cmd+C: the terminal has no scrollback or selection of its own to act on. Setting it to "default" uses the classic main-screen renderer, so Terminal.app owns scrollback and selection again — trackpad scroll and Cmd+C work exactly as they do in a plain terminal.
CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE: "1" turns off mouse tracking, which is what lets Claude Code intercept clicks (e.g., clicking an option in a permission prompt or AskUserQuestion). With it off, those prompts are keyboard-only.

All three are user-level settings and take effect after restarting Claude Code.

I am so relieved to have this functionality back. The only place Cmd+V still doesn't work for me is pasting image files into Claude Code — it's supported in iTerm2, but not in Terminal.app. For that I still have to use Ctrl+V, but because it's so rare I don't mind that too much.

Read more: Fullscreen rendering covers the tui setting, CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE, and copy-on-select in detail. Interactive mode has the full keyboard shortcut reference, including image paste.