> I understood that the command does not get executed, but what happens in the shell (I looked this up on Wikipedia too)? Does it just display the line and allo

> I understood that the command does not get executed, but what happens in the shell (I looked this up on Wikipedia too)? Does it just display the line and allow the user to edit it so that the starting and ending escape sequences can be removed along with any other edits and then the command executed? My understanding is that it's up to the shell, or whatever program, to decide how to handle it. (I didn't make this clear in my original post, and have updated it accordingly.) All bracketed paste is doing is providing a mode that tells the program "everything between these two symbols should be interpreted as input, not as commands"; it's then up to the program to decide how it wants to respond to the user's intention. At least for me, with Terminal.app and bash 5.0 (where it's not enabled by default), it behaves es you describe when enabled by `set enable-bracketed-paste on` in `.inputrc`. For vim, I believe the plugin is essentially doing the equivalent of `set paste` before and `set nopaste` after.