Files
buzz/docs
Matt Toohey b1f6b7ef77 feat(desktop): preserve mentions across copy and paste (#7228)
Copying a message out of the timeline lost the mention. The rendered
chip drops
the `@` for display, so the clipboard carried "John Smith" — two
ordinary words
no composer could bind back to a pubkey. Pasting into another channel
produced
dead text, and sending it tagged nobody.

## What changed

Every Buzz copy now writes two clipboard flavors in one transaction:

- **`text/plain`** — readable anywhere, sigils restored, no pubkeys.
This is what
  TextEdit, Slack, and every other external app receive.
- **`text/html`** — the same content with each mention wrapped in a span
carrying
  `data-mention-pubkey` / `-label` / `-kind`.

On paste, the composer harvests those records, registers each `name →
pubkey`
with the existing mention machinery, and inserts the content: the chip
re-lights
and the send path recovers the identity the author tagged. A marker
attribute
records what the plain flavor holds, so a Markdown copy pastes through
the text
pipeline and a rendered copy through the HTML one.

**Covered surfaces:** timeline selection copy, thread-panel selection
copy,
forum post/reply selection copy, "Copy message", and composer copy/cut —
plus
paste in both the channel and forum composers.

## Trust boundary

Clipboard HTML is untrusted, and the branch treats it that way:

- Records are capped (50), labels bounded (200 chars), and a pubkey must
be
  64 hex before it can become a `p` tag.
- **Only mentions the paste actually shows are registered.** An empty
`<span data-mention-pubkey=… -label="Jane Doe">` would otherwise rebind
that
display name for the rest of the composer session, so a later
hand-written
@Jane Doe would chip-light convincingly against the attacker's key. Each
  branch registers only the records whose label appears in the text *it*
inserts, matched with `getMentionOffsets` — the same matcher the
send-time
  extractor uses.
- **The visibility gate reads only what ProseMirror will insert.**
`DOMParser` hard-drops `script`, `style`, `title`, `noscript`, `object`,
and
`head` content, so `visible<style>@Jane Doe</style>` beside an empty
chip span
used to smuggle a binding past the gate. Those elements are stripped
before
  either output is derived.
- **A partial chip never gains a sigil.** A selection crossing a chip
boundary
falls through to the browser's default copy, which serializes the full
identity
attributes around a slice of the text — pasting that invented "@Smith"
out of
"John Smith". Paste now leaves a fragment as plain text, tolerating only
what a
whole chip picks up in transit (restored sigil, author casing, U+00A0
swaps,
  and the label cap's own ellipsis).

Both clipboard sides share one `matchChipTextToLabel` helper, in the
module that
owns the label attributes, so copy and paste cannot drift on what counts
as a
whole chip.

## Notes

- Mention matching reuses `getMentionOffsets`, so code spans and fences
are
  excluded and the longest display name wins.
- The plain flavor inlines chip boxes before reading `innerText`; a chip
is a
flex container, so the browser's own copy split "@John Smith" onto its
own line.
- `MarkdownMention` and `MacEmacsTextShortcuts` are extracted verbatim
from
`markdown.tsx` and `useRichTextEditor.ts` to keep both files under the
size gate.

## Testing

- ~40 unit tests over the flavor builder/parser, the visibility filter,
the
  ignored-tag sweep, and the chip-match verdicts.
- A Playwright spec (`desktop/tests/e2e/mention-clipboard.spec.ts`)
driving real
  copy/cut/paste DOM events: timeline and "Copy message" of a multi-word
non-member mention pasted into another channel and sent with the
original
pubkey in its `p` tag; the forum copy → forum reply round trip; composer
  copy/cut; plain flavor asserted to contain no 64-hex string; the
boundary-crossing drag; and the hidden-record and `<style>` smuggling
vectors.
- Every regression test is bound to a production seam and fails with its
guard
  removed.
- `just ci` / pre-push lanes green (5927 desktop unit tests, typecheck,
lint,
  file-size gate).

---------

Signed-off-by: Matt Toohey <contact@matttoohey.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-04 16:45:13 +10:00
..
2026-07-21 17:16:23 +00:00