Cannot select a substring of a chat message (from user) to copy

Open Beginner friendly
#494 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
86/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
css, typescript
Domain
frontend, web-dev

Research direction

Start with apps/web/src/index.css to confirm the global user-select rule, then inspect the USER_BUBBLE, USER_BUBBLE_BASE, PlainUserTurn, and assistant message wrappers in apps/web/src/chat/turns.tsx. Verify the relevant containers opt into text selection without disrupting the existing copy-button behavior. Done means users can select and copy substrings from both user and assistant messages.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Description

In the Pi chat panel, users can click the copy button on a message to copy the entire message, but cannot click and drag to select any part of the message text (user bubbles) to copy a snippet.

Because body has user-select: none in apps/web/src/index.css and content is expected to opt back in (.tr-prose-chat, data-selectable, etc.), chat message containers (USER_BUBBLE / USER_BUBBLE_BASE / PlainUserTurn and assistant message wrappers in apps/web/src/chat/turns.tsx) currently do not include .tr-prose-chat or data-selectable (or user-select: text). As a result, message text inherits user-select: none and cannot be selected.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open a workspace and open or start a chat session.
  2. Send a message or wait for an assistant response.
  3. Try clicking and dragging the cursor over words or lines within the message bubble to highlight/select a portion of the text.

Expected behavior

Users can click and drag to highlight/select any part of a user or assistant chat message and copy the selected text, while preserving whole-message copy via the copy button.

Actual behavior

No text selection occurs when dragging over the message text; the cursor cannot select substrings within the message.

Environment

  • OS: macOS 26.6.2 (Darwin arm64)
  • Bun version (bun --version): 1.4.2
  • Node version (node --version): v26.8.2
  • ThinkRail version / commit: 6a836d3fe (upstream/main)

🤖 Generated by AI agent

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
481
Forks
37
Avg merge
21h 6m
Merged PRs (30d)
130

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from JetBrains/thinkrail

All issues in JetBrains/thinkrail

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.