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Paste and drop files into the terminal

Remote CLIs — AI coding agents in particular — often want a file: “look at this screenshot”, “read this PDF”. Paste or drop the file straight into the terminal and SigilTTY does the plumbing: the file uploads over SFTP to /tmp on the server, and the remote path is inserted into your prompt as if you had typed it, followed by a single space.

Nothing is ever submitted for you. Pressing Enter stays your move — the path just sits in the prompt, ready.

Triggering it

Section titled “Triggering it”
  • Paste — ⌘V on Mac and iPad, the accessory bar’s paste button or the input-method paste chip on iPhone and iPad, or the Edit menu on Mac — whenever the clipboard’s real payload is a file rather than plain text.
  • Drag & drop — drop files onto the terminal area, on Mac and iPad.

Pasting ordinary text is completely untouched: it goes into the prompt exactly as before. The file path only kicks in when the clipboard holds a file.

The rules

Section titled “The rules”
  • Up to 10 files per paste or drop; more than that and the whole batch is refused.
  • Folders are refused — compress them first. (Checked properly: a macOS .app bundle counts as a folder no matter what its name looks like.)
  • One file can be up to 256 MB; raw clipboard data, like a screenshot, up to 32 MB.
  • Raster formats a remote host usually can’t read — HEIC, TIFF, BMP — are converted to PNG. png, jpg, gif, webp, SVG, and every kind of document upload byte-for-byte unchanged.

Each file’s path is inserted the moment its upload finishes — no waiting for the whole batch. A file that fails its pre-check (a folder, over the limit) is skipped and the rest continue, with a summary at the end.

Remote naming

Section titled “Remote naming”

The remote name keeps as much of the original as survives sanitizing, plus 8 hex characters:

Q3 报告 final.pdf  →  /tmp/Q3-final-3fa2b1c9.pdf

The hex suffix makes collisions impossible, and the sanitizing guarantees the inserted path never needs quoting — it is always safe to press Enter on.

SSH only

Section titled “SSH only”

The upload needs an SFTP channel, so this works in SSH sessions only. In a Telnet or serial session you’ll see “File upload needs an SSH session”.

Security

Section titled “Security”

A remote program can ask the terminal for clipboard access (OSC 52) — that path can never trigger a file upload. Only your own paste or drop does.

Feedback

Section titled “Feedback”

Progress shows in a compact overlay at the top of the terminal, with a Cancel button. Failures and notices appear in the same overlay and clear themselves after a few seconds — nothing is ever printed into the terminal itself, so a full-screen TUI stays intact.