Copy branch name from PR screen is broken

[JohnLKramer]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Pull Requests

Body

Bug: The branch copy button on the PR screen populates the system clipboard with an unnecessary «class RTF » payload alongside «class utf8».

NOTE: this issue also happens when attempting to copy a file name from the diff section. I suspect that there are other places where copy is broken.

Specifically:

(After copying branch name in Chrome on Mac OS)

osascript -e 'clipboard info'               
«class RTF », 586, «class utf8», 99, «class ut16», 192, string, 31, Unicode text, 190

Impact: When switching focus to text only applications such as native macOS Terminal, the legacy RTF translation layer fails or times out, causing Terminal's standard Command + V action to drop the update and paste stale buffer text.

Suggested Fix: Ensure all UI copy handlers utilize directly to write plain UTF-8 text (text/plain) rather than attaching rich-text/RTF selection objects.

UPDATE: it isn't just branch name copy that's broken, copy links to PR comments is broken too.

Screen.Recording.2026-09-03.at.17.29.44.mov

[xplacewithdrawals]

• -

[mdesilva]

When I select the copy branch name button my whole browser crashes.

[reddy895]

I was able to reproduce the same behavior, and it looks like the issue is broader than just the PR branch-name button.

Since copying file names and PR comment links also adds the RTF payload, this seems more likely to be related to GitHub’s shared clipboard/copy implementation rather than an individual button.

A good fix would be to make these copy handlers explicitly write text/plain to the clipboard instead of relying on the browser’s rich-text selection behavior. That should also prevent the stale-paste issue in applications like Terminal.