| name | paste-text |
| description | Enter literal text — especially Chinese, emoji, and punctuation — reliably through clawtouch-mcp by writing it to the system clipboard and pasting it, instead of typing character-by-character. Sidesteps the input-method editor (IME) and keyboard-layout problems that make hid.type produce garbled or wrong characters. Load whenever an agent must enter non-ASCII text, or any exact text, into a focused field on a machine where an IME (Pinyin, etc.) or a non-US keyboard layout may be active. |
Skill: paste-text (reliable text entry via the clipboard)
Cross-cutting technique — not tied to any one app or app version, and
works with any clawtouch-mcp release. If a command here is wrong on your
OS, open an issue at
tinqiao-oss/clawtouch-skills.
For LLM agents entering literal text through clawtouch-mcp. hid.type
sends raw US-layout HID keycodes — the same bytes a physical US
keyboard sends. The operating system, its active input method (IME),
and its keyboard layout then decide which character each keycode
becomes. That makes hid.type unreliable for anything beyond plain ASCII
on a US layout:
- Chinese / Japanese / Korean — not possible at all. There is no
keycode for 你 or 好; a Pinyin IME turns
ni hao into a
candidate-picking session, not the literal text.
- Punctuation under a CJK IME — changes silently. With Pinyin's
"Chinese punctuation" mode on,
: becomes ： and , becomes ，.
- Non-US layouts (AZERTY / Dvorak / Colemak) — the same keycodes map
to different glyphs, so
hid.type("123") can come out as &é".
The reliable way: put text on the clipboard, then paste
Pasting hands the exact bytes to the field in one shot — no IME
composition, no candidate picking, no layout translation.
Step 1 — write the text to the system clipboard. This is an ordinary
OS command run from your own shell, not an HID call:
- macOS:
printf '%s' '你好，ClawTouch！' | pbcopy
- Windows (PowerShell) — encoding-safe; do not pipe to
clip, it corrupts non-ASCII:
Set-Clipboard '你好，ClawTouch！'
- Linux (X11):
printf '%s' '...' | xclip -selection clipboard
- Linux (Wayland):
printf '%s' '...' | wl-copy
These commands deliberately add no trailing newline: use printf '%s'
(not echo, which appends \n) on macOS/Linux; Set-Clipboard '...' is
exact on Windows (verified). A stray trailing newline in the clipboard can
auto-submit a chat box — see Known gotchas. If the text itself contains a
quote/apostrophe, shell-escape it (here-doc / stdin) instead of naive
single-quoting.
Step 2 — paste with an HID shortcut:
| OS | Paste call |
|---|
| macOS | hid.key("cmd+v") |
| Windows / Linux | hid.key("ctrl+v") |
The text arrives literally and instantly, independent of the active IME
or layout.
When to use this vs hid.type
| Situation | Use |
|---|
| Any non-ASCII text (Chinese, emoji, accented) | Clipboard paste — the only reliable way |
| Exact ASCII where punctuation must be correct | Clipboard paste — avoids IME punctuation drift |
| Short plain-ASCII on a known US / ABC layout | hid.type is fine |
Keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+c, alt+tab, …) | hid.key — keycodes are layout-immune and the IME ignores them |
Known gotchas
- Paste overwrites the host clipboard. On a machine the user is also
using, you are clobbering whatever they had copied. If that matters,
read the current clipboard first (
pbpaste / Get-Clipboard /
xclip -selection clipboard -o) and restore it after the paste lands.
Restoring does not scrub the text from clipboard-history /
cloud-clipboard tools (Win+V, Universal Clipboard, third-party
managers) — avoid this route for secrets you don't want captured or
synced off-box.
- The target field must accept a paste. Most fields accept paste
(including password fields — that's how password managers work), but a
few hardened secure-input controls block
Ctrl+V; if paste silently
does nothing, fall back to hid.type for ASCII.
- Give the paste a moment. After
cmd+v / ctrl+v, wait briefly (a
hid.hover over a safe spot, or a short sleep) before the next action
so the field commits — a large paste is not instantaneous.
- A pasted newline may submit. In a chat box, a literal newline in
the clipboard text can send the message. Paste the body, then send
enter yourself only when you actually mean to.
- Switching the IME to ABC is a weaker fallback. It only makes ASCII
reliable — it still cannot enter Chinese — and the toggle shortcut
varies per IME (Caps Lock / Shift / Ctrl+Space), so it is easy to flip
the wrong way. Prefer paste.
When this skill doesn't help
- No shell access. This pattern needs some way to write the OS
clipboard (a shell command). An MCP client that exposes only
hid.*
and nothing else cannot use it, and is limited to hid.type's ASCII
range.
- Rich content (formatted text, images): a paste delivers whatever
the clipboard already holds; building rich clipboard content is
app- and OS-specific and out of scope here.
