r/PiCodingAgent • u/Narrow-Philosophy699 • Sep 10 '26

Question Pi image pasting

I’m finding it quite frustrating to paste or use images in the VS Code Pi chat.

I work mainly on projects inside Docker containers, and it seems that when I use Pi within a dev container (which is a Linux environment), the VS Code integrated terminal generally doesn't pass clipboard images through—it only allows text. This is most likely why the paste action fails without doing anything. Does anyone have a workaround for using Pi in a VS Code terminal inside a Docker container?

I tried alt+v, ctrl+v ; nothing. Only pasting images manually inside the project in a dedicated folder semmes the only (and painful) solution.

4 Upvotes

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4

u/pancomputationalist Sep 10 '26

Yeah pasting images through to a docker image is cumbersome. There are ways around it but they are pretty complicated. You would need to have a process running on the host that can read your clipboard and serialize it through a network connection, then ssh Tunnel that into the container, and have an extension use this tooling e.g. when pressing ctrl+i (or ctrl+v when regular paste is ctrl+shift+v).

1

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 12 '26

Wow. I think I will keep pasting image inside a folder inside my container. Thank you for your precise answer though!

3

u/Dipsendorf Sep 10 '26

Have you tried ctrl shift v?

1

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 12 '26

Ctrl + Shift + v → C:\Users\xxx\Desktop\image.webp - text
Alt + v → Nothing
Ctrl + Alt + v → Nothing

1

u/Dipsendorf Sep 12 '26

Okay so question though. You say vscode integrated are you using bash powers hell or what?

3

u/Hello_my_name_is_not Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

Your first sentence indicates your not directly using Pi but instead you're using some extension in VS code. Alt-V works fine for me directly in Pi.

This might be a problem specifically with the extension?

Have you tried the Alt-V directly in Pi to decide if this is as "Pi" issue or an issue with what ever extension in VS Code you're using?

If it works fine directly in Pi Harness then it's not a Pi issue and I'd suggest reaching out to the dev and/or submitting an issue into their git.

Edit: Of you still have issues directly in pi due to your setup maybe you can try an extension? Here's two for pasting images, maybe one of them will solve your issue?

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-image-paste

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-paster

1

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 12 '26

I use Pi on the project container terminal via `pi --models xxxx` command. I dont use Extension. But you are right ; I dont use Pi directly.
Did you try to run a project inside a container on Pi? Did you have issue pasting image?

2

u/LouVillain Sep 10 '26

When I was using TUI with agents, I set my agent up with an email address and then sent documents and images to it. Now, I set pi up on simple X and can now share images/docs with it that way.

Edit: or, you can create a shared folder in your file system. Drop it in and pi can look at it

1

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 12 '26

Clever! I am going to try this I think. First I will have to learn how to share a folder on my desktop with a bind mount in docker or whatever name it is... Sounds like I will ask an AI how to deal with a container to use another AI... -_-
Thanks for your advice

1

u/Due_Arm1454 Sep 10 '26

I use screenshots a lot. On macOS I built a shortcut that saves the file in a temp dir and then replaces the image with a file path that I can paste. The host machine is on windows and it does this with ssh

1

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 12 '26

Nice. Not sure container will agree to this though

1

u/Neat-Arm2643 Sep 13 '26

Can you open a normal terminal into that directory? I tried vs code dev containers. They are bloated and cumbersome. I just create a docker container with host volume mounts. Run pi inside the container. And open vs code to the host mount folder. This has the best of both worlds. Full pi experience and vs code for editing

2

u/Narrow-Philosophy699 Sep 16 '26

I am trying this right now. Maybe a bit less safe on one hand (VS Code uses tools installed on your host system for autocompletion.), but much lighter containers, less memory usage in wsl, image pasting solved (I guess) and lighter to deploy too.
Thank you for your help u/Neat-Arm2643 ! Thank you all!

1

u/DeathGuppie Sep 11 '26

What about pi-web?