Message copy

Overview

Every user and assistant bubble in a chat carries a small copy icon below it. One tap puts that message's text on the clipboard, so a user can paste an answer into a ticket, a commit message, or another tool without selecting text by hand on a touch screen. The button gives its feedback in place — the glyph itself changes — so nothing covers the conversation.

Usage

1. Open a chat.

2. Under any of your own messages or any assistant answer, tap the clipboard icon.

3. The glyph becomes a check for about 1.4 s, then returns to the clipboard. If the clipboard refuses the write it becomes a cross instead.

   The control is icon-only — it repeats under every bubble, so a text label would compete with the message for the same line at 360 px. The state is still announced to assistive tech through the button's accessible name: Copy message → Copied message / Copy failed.

   What gets copied:

• User turns — the message text exactly as it was sent.

• Assistant turns — the final answer. A Thinking block is scaffolding, not the reply, so it is left out when the turn also has an answer. A turn that was stopped before its first content token has no answer, so it copies its reasoning rather than an empty string.

• Image attachments — an attached image lives in the DOM as a data: URL and cannot travel through the clipboard as text, so the message lists the attachment by file name instead, e.g.:

look at this

[image: shot.png]

Not copied, by design:

• Tool cards — tool calls and results are already reachable through the file viewer and the tool card's own actions.

• Error bubbles — an error card keeps its Retry action; see Chat error surfacing and Retry and auto-retry.

• System prompt / setup cards — collapsed reference material rather than a turn.

  The button is available while a turn is still streaming: tapping it copies the text that is on screen at that moment.

Implementation notes

The control is built by buildCopyButton in frontend/src/components/chat/transcript.js and styled by .chat-msg__copy in frontend/src/chat-transcript.css.

• Compact painted box, legal tap area. The glyph is the whole button, so the painted box is the smallest glyph-control size, --tap-xs (26px in frontend/src/base.css) — smaller than the --tap-sm send / MCP toggles because it repeats under every bubble. .tap-target expands the hit area to the --tap floor (44px) without painting it, so the mobile-first tap rule still holds.

• State lives in the glyph. The three SVGs are COPY_GLYPH_IDLE / _COPIED / _FAILED, drawn in currentColor; the CSS tint (muted → success / danger) is the only color decision. The glyph and the aria-label / title flip together, so the state is never carried by color alone.