RSPaster - Type Into Consoles That Will Not Paste

Hypervisor consoles, VNC viewers and IPMI KVM sessions ignore your clipboard. RSPaster types the text instead, one real keystroke at a time, after a countdown long enough to put focus where you need it.

Some consoles simply have no paste. You end up retyping a four-line command by hand into a KVM session, at 3am, with a typo waiting at the end of it. RSPaster is the small window you paste into instead: read the commands back, set a delay, then let it type them for you.

No dependencies beyond a stock Windows 10 or 11 install. It uses the .NET Framework 4.x and the C# compiler that are already on the machine, so there is nothing to download, no runtime to install, and no network access at any point.

What it does

Types instead of pasting	Real SendInput keystrokes with per-character scancodes, which is what VM, IPMI and VNC consoles actually listen for.
Waits between lines	Optional pause after each Enter, for machines too slow or busy to accept the next command yet.
Waits for you	A countdown before it starts, and a global hotkey so you can focus the console first and never take focus away.
Cancels instantly	Esc, the hotkey, or the button. Even mid-way through a 30 second line delay.
Handles awkward characters	AltGr characters on European layouts are sent as real AltGr chords, not unicode events the consoles would drop.
Hides the text	One checkbox turns the box into dots, for a password on a shared screen. Pasting still works while hidden.
Grabs text back out	Ctrl+Alt+G freezes the screen, you drag a rectangle over the console, and the recognized text lands on the clipboard. Recognition is the on-device Windows engine: the image is never uploaded. The clipboard itself is a shared surface, so RSPaster marks the text to keep it out of clipboard history and cloud clipboard.
Keeps phrases for the day	A collapsible panel of masked one-line slots with your own labels, for passwords that rotate daily: fetch once, type all day from the tray. Never written to disk.
Keeps nothing	The text box never touches disk. Not settings, not a recent list, not a crash backup.
Looks like the suite	30 palettes from the Canvas Suite design language, including the title bar and scrollbar.

Which file do I run?

File	Job
RSPaster.exe	The app. Use this one.
Run-From-Source.cmd	Runs the same app without the exe, compiling the sources on launch.
Build-RSPaster.cmd	Not a launcher. Builds RSPaster.exe from the sources.

Run-From-Source.cmd and RSPaster.exe are not two programs. They are the same program, either compiled fresh on every launch or compiled once ahead of time. Identical behavior, identical features. What differs is the cost:

	RSPaster.exe	Run-From-Source.cmd
Window appears in	0.7 s	2.8 s
Memory	38 MB	95 MB
Shows in Task Manager as	RSPaster	powershell
Needs	nothing	the eight .cs files beside it
SmartScreen and antivirus	can flag an unsigned exe	ships no binary
Display scaling above 100%	sharp	soft, see below

Prefer the exe. The source path is there for handing the tool to someone who will not run an unknown binary, for machines that block unsigned ones, and for editing a .cs file and seeing the change without a build step.

On a display scaled above 100%, use the exe. DPI awareness has to be declared before a process opens its first window, and the PowerShell host has already opened one, so the script path lays out at 1x and lets Windows stretch the result. The proportions stay right but the window is soft. To check the scaled layout on your own display, run tools\Dpi-Report.cmd.

(Run-From-Source.ps1 does the actual work; the .cmd is only a double-clickable wrapper, because Windows opens a .ps1 in an editor rather than running it.)

Quickstart

If the zip came with RSPaster.exe, run it. Nothing to install.

To build the exe yourself, run Build-RSPaster.cmd once. It finds the in-box compiler at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\csc.exe and writes RSPaster.exe beside the sources. To skip the binary entirely, double-click Run-From-Source.cmd.

To hand it to someone else: run tools\Make-Dist.ps1. It rebuilds the exe and writes dist\RSPaster.zip holding only what is needed to run or rebuild, under 200 KB. Unzip it anywhere and run RSPaster.exe, or double-click Run-From-Source.cmd to run without the binary at all. Nothing is installed and nothing is written outside %APPDATA%\RSPaster, so uninstalling is deleting the folder.

Then:

1. Paste your text into the box.
2. Set the start delay (time to focus the target) and the key delay (pause between keystrokes).
3. Either click Type after delay and focus the target during the countdown, or focus the target first and press Ctrl+Alt+V. The hotkey deliberately does not pull focus back, so the keys land where you are looking.
4. Esc, the hotkey again, or Cancel stops it mid-stream.

Options

Option	Default	What it does
Start delay	3 s	Countdown before typing begins, so you can focus the target.
Key delay	15 ms	Pause between keystrokes. Raise it to 30 - 50 ms if a slow BMC drops characters.
Delay between lines	off, 15 s	Waits after each Enter before typing the next line, for machines where a command needs time to finish before the next can be entered.
Press Enter at end	off	Appends a newline so the last line is submitted.
Hide text	off	Shows the text as dots. Paste still works and replaces the box; untick to edit by hand.
Clear after typing	off	Wipes the box once typing finishes, hidden text included.
Always on top	on	Keeps the window above the console.
Unicode mode	off	Sends every character as a Unicode event instead of scancodes. Turn on only if output comes out garbled.
Theme	Classic	30 palettes from the Canvas Suite, grouped Paper / Warm / Cool / Night / Screen.

The window lives in the tray. Closing it hides it rather than quitting, so the hotkey keeps working; Exit is on the tray icon's right-click menu.

Preferences are kept in %APPDATA%\RSPaster\settings.ini, a plain key=value file you can edit. The contents of the text box are never written to disk, in any form: no settings entry, no recent-items list, no crash backup. It routinely holds passwords, so it stays in memory only.

Sending a password. Tick Hide text and the box shows dots instead of characters. Pasting still works while hidden and replaces the whole box, so the usual flow never puts the secret on screen at all: tick Hide text, paste from your password manager, send it. Untick to edit by hand. What gets typed is the real text either way, and Clear after typing wipes the hidden copy too.

The box is read-only while hidden. Editing a mask means mapping every caret move and selection back onto the string underneath, and getting that subtly wrong on a password is worse than not offering it.

Grabbing text back. Typing into a console is half the emergency; reading its output back out is the other half, because the same consoles that refuse paste also refuse copy. OCR in the top bar (or Ctrl+Alt+G) freezes the screen, dims it, and you drag a rectangle over the text you want. The recognized text lands on the clipboard with its line structure intact, and a result window shows it in an editable box - so a misread character is visible immediately, fixable on the spot, and re-copied with one click. Recognition is the OCR engine Windows itself ships, running entirely on this machine - the same no-network promise as the rest of the app.

The screen is frozen before you aim, so a console that is actively printing cannot scroll the line away between aiming and capturing. Esc cancels.

Read grabbed digits with suspicion, especially zeros. Measured limitation: the engine misreads stylized zeros (the slashed zero in Consolas, the dotted zero in Cascadia) as e, 8, O or @ at small glyph sizes, while nearly everything else comes back clean. Zoom the console viewer before grabbing if you can - larger glyphs read dramatically better - and eyeball identifiers like interface names before pasting them anywhere that matters. On machines without an OCR language pack (some LTSC and Server images) the OCR button explains itself and stays off; everything else works as normal.

Phrases. The Phrases button in the top bar opens a panel of masked one-line slots, each with a label you can word however you like and its own Type after delay button - the same wording as the main action, because it does the same thing with that slot's contents. It exists for credentials that rotate daily: fetch them once in the morning, and because closing the window only hides it to the tray, they are there to re-type all day. The status line names the slot's label during a run, never its contents or even its length. Paste into a slot with plain Ctrl+V; only the first line of the clipboard is taken, so the trailing newline a password manager appends cannot become a stray Enter fired mid-login. Labels and the slot count are remembered between runs; the phrase contents are not - they live in memory only, and a reboot costs one re-paste.

How it works, and where it stops

Keystrokes are injected with the Win32 SendInput API. By default each character is mapped through the target window's keyboard layout into a virtual key plus scancode, which is what VM, IPMI and VNC consoles actually listen for. Characters that need AltGr, or that are absent from the layout, fall back to a Unicode event automatically.

Keystrokes go wherever focus is. The countdown exists so you can put focus in the right place. In hypervisor and IPMI viewers, click into the console screen area first: their surrounding toolbars do not forward keys to the guest.

Raise the key delay over slow links. BMC and IPMI KVM consoles drop keystrokes sent faster than they can process. Missing characters almost always mean the key delay is too low.

Key delay and line delay solve different problems. Key delay is about the console keeping up with the typing. Line delay is about the machine keeping up with the work: on a slow or busy box, a command has to finish before the next one can be entered, and without a pause the following line is typed into a shell that is not ready and is simply lost. Set it to comfortably more than the slowest command in the list. The status bar counts the wait down, and Esc, the hotkey and Cancel all stay responsive throughout, so an over-long delay costs nothing but the time you choose to let run.

Elevation. Windows blocks a normal process from sending input to a window running at higher privilege, and it does so silently: the send reports success and the keystrokes are discarded. RSPaster therefore checks the target before it types rather than trying to notice afterwards. If the focused window is elevated and RSPaster is not, the run is refused with the target named, and Restart as Admin at the bottom of the window is the fix. The same check refuses when the workstation is locked or a UAC prompt has taken the secure desktop, which are the other two ways keystrokes vanish without a trace.

CapsLock. RSPaster asks the target's keyboard layout what each key would actually produce with CapsLock in its current state, so text types correctly with it on or off. The exception is a console that forwards raw scancodes to a guest: the guest applies its own CapsLock, which nothing on this side can see. If text arrives miscased in a VM console, check CapsLock inside the guest.

The UAC secure desktop cannot be reached. It is isolated from all user-mode input injection, so no tool running in your session can type into it. RSPaster works with UAC only where prompts are configured to appear on the normal desktop. Running elevated covers ordinary elevated windows, not the secure desktop.

See DEPLOY.md for putting it on a machine: clearing the web mark that makes a downloaded exe look broken, what it writes and where, running it elevated, and what to expect on a locked-down or shared box.

Layout

Path	Purpose
RSPaster.cs	Main window, tray icon, hotkey, countdown.
KeySender.cs	Keystroke injection and every P/Invoke.
Themes.cs	The palette table, ported from the Canvas Suite.
Controls.cs	Owner-drawn themed controls and the custom scrollbar.
Settings.cs	Preference load and save.
Ocr.cs	On-device text recognition through the OCR engine Windows ships.
GrabOverlay.cs	The freeze-and-drag region selector for Grab.
Run-From-Source.cmd / .ps1	Run without the exe, compiling on launch.
Build-RSPaster.cmd	Compile the exe with the in-box compiler.
favicon.svg	The mark. Static hex, shared family ground, not themed.
DEPLOY.md	Putting it on a machine, and what Windows does to a download.
docs/src/	HTML sources for the hero and social images, plus the real captures they use.
tools/charcheck.ps1	Style check: fails on em-dashes, en-dashes, and British spellings.
tools/Make-Dist.ps1	Builds dist/RSPaster.zip, the run-or-rebuild file set.
tools/Dpi-Report.cmd	Prints the measured layout at the display's real scaling.
tools/Render-Png.ps1	Renders an HTML source to a PNG at an exact size.