The agent Terminal window

Every agent card has a Terminal view: a live browser window that agent’s tmux session, served by ttyd and rendered with xterm.js. It shows exactly what the agent’s CLI sees and lets an operator intervene directly in the pane.

Copying text out of it

The Terminal page is not an ordinary web page, so the browser’s usual mouse and keyboard behavior is partly intercepted:

1. tmux mouse mode owns an ordinary drag — that is what lets the scroll wheel page back through history instead of selecting text. Hold ⇧ Shift while dragging to bypass it and make a normal terminal selection.
2. xterm.js keeps that selection in its own model, not in the page, so the browser’s Copy command previously had nothing of the pane to serialize.

With the selection made, ⌘C (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+C (Linux/Windows) copies it — the Terminal page answers that gesture (and the browser’s Edit ▸ Copy menu item) itself. A plain Ctrl+C is deliberately left alone: it is still sent to the agent’s pane as SIGINT. Pasting back in uses the browser’s own paste gesture: ⌘V or Ctrl+Shift+V.

This works on hive v5 builds that include the fix for hivecommons/hive#9941 (commit 7ea9325 and later). On older builds, selecting text tries to copy automatically on selection change, which browsers that require a user gesture for clipboard access (for example Firefox) silently refuse — the selection looks copied but the clipboard still holds whatever was there before.

Copying a login URL

For an OAuth/login link, prefer the dashboard’s 🔑 Copy login URL button on the agent card instead of selecting it in the Terminal. It captures the pane server-side and rejoins wrapped lines, so the URL arrives whole; a Shift-drag selection of a line-wrapped URL copies the wrap’s newlines along with it, and the link silently fails at the identity provider.

Troubleshooting

• Paste produces old clipboard content, not what you selected. Confirm the selection was made with Shift-drag (not a plain drag, which tmux mouse mode consumes) and that the copy gesture was ⌘C / Ctrl+Shift+C or Edit ▸ Copy, not a plain Ctrl+C.
• Firefox specifically. Clipboard writes outside a user gesture are blocked by Firefox; if copying still does not work after upgrading, confirm the hive is on a build after hivecommons/hive#9950.
• Not served over HTTPS. navigator.clipboard requires a secure context; a hive reachable over plain HTTP falls back to a manual-selection copy that some browsers still refuse the same way older builds did.

See also: Troubleshooting for the full write-up this page summarizes.