From c4dda58ba29a105d9262bfb48b259342beded1bb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: markbus-ai <58405544+markbus-ai@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2026 09:01:37 -0300
Subject: [PATCH] Stop the clipboard picker freezing on huge pastes (#6568)
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Every keystroke in the search box scanned, lowercased, and split the
full text of every history entry, and the preview pane laid out the
entire selection with WrapAnywhere. A single 1.6MB paste (or a large
file selection) turned that into hundreds of megabytes of work on the
shell thread and stalled the render thread — freezing the whole
desktop.

Cap each entry once as it enters the display, so searching, previewing,
and rendering all work on a bounded prefix. Pasting reads the full entry
back from history by index, so nothing is actually lost. The cut lands
on a line break, keeping a file:// URI from truncating into a bogus path.

Co-authored-by: markbusking <marcosbustos.dev@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
---
 shell/plugins/clipboard/ClipboardHistory.js | 16 ++++++++++++-
 test/shell.d/clipboard-test.sh              | 26 +++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 41 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/shell/plugins/clipboard/ClipboardHistory.js b/shell/plugins/clipboard/ClipboardHistory.js
index 54433f0c..49008ccc 100644
--- a/shell/plugins/clipboard/ClipboardHistory.js
+++ b/shell/plugins/clipboard/ClipboardHistory.js
@@ -157,6 +157,20 @@ function fullText(entry) {
   return String(entry.text || "")
 }
 
+// The picker only ever searches and renders a prefix of an entry, so scan and
+// render just that much. A single huge paste otherwise costs hundreds of
+// megabytes of string work on every keystroke and stalls the whole shell.
+// Pasting reads the full entry back from history by index, so nothing is lost.
+var displayTextLimit = 8192
+
+function cappedEntry(entry) {
+  if (!entry || entry.type !== "text" || entry.text.length <= displayTextLimit) return entry
+
+  // Cut on a line break so a file:// URI never truncates into a bogus path.
+  var cut = entry.text.lastIndexOf("\n", displayTextLimit)
+  return { type: "text", text: entry.text.slice(0, cut > 0 ? cut : displayTextLimit) }
+}
+
 function displayRows(history, query, limit) {
   var values = Array.isArray(history) ? history : []
   var needle = String(query || "").trim().toLowerCase()
@@ -168,7 +182,7 @@ function displayRows(history, query, limit) {
   var rows = []
 
   for (var i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
-    var entry = normalizeEntry(values[i])
+    var entry = cappedEntry(normalizeEntry(values[i]))
     if (!entry) continue
     if (needle && searchableText(entry).toLowerCase().indexOf(needle) < 0) continue
 
diff --git a/test/shell.d/clipboard-test.sh b/test/shell.d/clipboard-test.sh
index 79ce6fb8..f83c6322 100644
--- a/test/shell.d/clipboard-test.sh
+++ b/test/shell.d/clipboard-test.sh
@@ -179,6 +179,32 @@ assertEqual(
   2,
   'clipboard respawns both watchers when they die'
 )
+
+assertDeepEqual(
+  clipboard.displayRows([{ type: 'text', text: 'a'.repeat(8192) + 'needle' }], 'needle', 50),
+  [],
+  'clipboard display rows do not search text past the cap'
+)
+
+assertDeepEqual(
+  clipboard.displayRows([{ type: 'text', text: 'needle' + 'a'.repeat(100000) }], 'needle', 50).map(row => row.index),
+  [0],
+  'clipboard display rows search text up to the cap'
+)
+
+const hugeTextRow = clipboard.displayRows([{ type: 'text', text: 'z'.repeat(100000) }], '', 50)[0]
+assert(
+  hugeTextRow.fullText.length === 8192 && hugeTextRow.previewText.length === 8192,
+  'clipboard display rows cap what a huge text entry renders'
+)
+
+const hugeFileList = []
+for (let i = 0; i < 5000; i++) hugeFileList.push('file:///home/dhh/clip-' + i + '.mp4')
+const hugeFileRow = clipboard.displayRows([{ type: 'text', text: hugeFileList.join('\n') + '\n' }], '', 50)[0]
+assert(
+  hugeFileRow.entryType === 'file' && hugeFileRow.fullText.split('\n').every(path => path.endsWith('.mp4')),
+  'clipboard display rows cap a huge file list without truncating a path'
+)
 JS
 
 TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)