What ⏺ and ⎿ mean in Claude Code, and how to keep them out of your paste

If you copy from Claude Code, you've seen these two at the start of lines in your paste:

• ⏺ is U+23FA, black circle for record. Claude Code draws it in front of each reply and each tool call, like ⏺ Bash(npm test).
• ⎿ is U+23BF, dentistry symbol light vertical and bottom right. It hangs under a tool call and points at its result, like ⎿ 42 passing.

On screen they make the conversation easy to scan. In a paste they're noise, and because they're ordinary characters, not decoration, the terminal copies them like any other text. The two spaces that line the reply up after ⏺ come along too.

Remove them with one command

If you're comfortable in a shell, this removes the symbol and the indent at the start of each line, and trailing spaces, from whatever is on your clipboard:

pbpaste | sed -E 's/^ *(⏺|⎿) +//; s/^  //; s/ +$//' | pbcopy

It doesn't rejoin lines that the terminal broke at the window edge, so a paragraph still arrives as several lines. That's the harder part, because you have to tell a wrapped line from one that was meant to end, like a line of a log or a command.

Remove them and fix the line breaks

The free terminal text cleaner removes ⏺, ⎿ and the indent, trims padding, and joins only the lines a wrap cut. Tool results under ⎿ are left line by line, since they're program output.

To skip the extra step entirely, Unwrap does this on your Mac whenever you copy from a terminal, and for Claude Code replies it pastes the original Markdown from the session files Claude Code keeps on your Mac, so there's nothing to strip in the first place.