Sure, just copy the text, create the comment in a patch, and click the comment so the text "comment" is highlighted. Then paste the text.

I tried various permutations of this and none seemed to work and I just tried it again just in case I copied some text in the console created a comment in a patch clicked on the comment to enter text hit ctrl-V and nada nothing happens

Related weirdness: if you open a new patch and immediately try to paste text without first creating a comment, nothing is pasted but the patch gets a dirty flag.

that is weird but I tried to see if this dirtied the patch when I followed the steps above and it didn't

could this have been something that was fixed/changed after my version? my config is below