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Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's flickering in terminal
- badlogic 9mo agoIt is very 2026, that this exists for the product by a company that goes all in on vibe coding. Kudos for the creative solution.
- donw 9mo agoI mentioned this to Claude and this was the response: Ha! The irony is not lost on anyone. "We've built the world's most advanced AI coding assistant. It can refactor entire codebases, debug complex issues, and ship production features autonomously. Anyway, here's a terminal bug that makes your screen look like a slot machine. We'll get to it eventually."
- venturecruelty 9mo ago[flagged]
- dang 9mo ago"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: unfortunately your account has done basically nothing except break the site guidelines. I've therefore banned it. If you've read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it should be obvious that this is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. p.s. I suppose I'd better add that no, this is not because of your views, it's because we're trying to preserve this place for thoughtful conversation. Accounts that pour snark and cynicism over everything have the effect that pouring salt on a slug has. Yes, I'm comparing HN to a slug, and we'd rather be a happy one than a salted one.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- venturecruelty 9mo ago[dead]
- alva 9mo agoExcellent, thank you. This had be causing me headaches!
- dionian 9mo agoyeah its like im being hypnotized and im forced to wait until programming is over
- whh 9mo agoYou are a legend. Thank you.
- bearjaws 9mo agoDamn I had assumed it was that simple of a problem just based on how the scrolling messed up, and thought "surely it's not that simple"...
- janoelze 9mo agoamazing, thanks
- prodigycorp 9mo agoI have not used Claude Code in a couple months. THEY HAVEN’T FIXED THIS YET? I’m starting to think that the reason why anthropic doesn’t open source Claude code isn’t due to competitive reasons, it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is. Maybe they bought Bun to increase the rate of flickering so that the text looks solid again
- f311a 9mo agoImagine the amount of slop PRs if it was open source. They don’t want to taste their own medicine
- prodigycorp 9mo agoReading their GitHub issues already is like reading through the diary entries of spurned lovers. I can only imagine the PRs.
- behnamoh 9mo ago> it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is. if Amodei hadn't said "90% of code will be written by AI", at least I wouldn't call them hypocrites, but the fact that the company that makes such wild claims can't fix a freaking flicker and scroll issue until an indie-dev steps in just shows how far behind their product is from their claims. I have CC and use many models with it (Codex in CC, try it!), but I won't let Anthropic "lecture" us about how "the roots of the problem go deep". Literally no other CLI tool has these issues: opencode, codex, gemini, droid, etc.
- Der_Einzige 9mo agoDid this get written mostly by human hands, or did AI also write this? I would hope something like this was primarily made by humans...
- eru 9mo agoWhy?
- rvz 9mo agoAn AI wrote it.
- behnamoh 9mo agoif it works then who cares?
- pona-a 9mo agoBecause then at least one entity in the universe has developed a theory for this codebase, tested it before sharing, and could meaningfully contribute beyond 5-sentence prompts.
- ashirviskas 9mo agoDo you also write your bytecode by human hands? At which abstraction layer do we draw the line?
- hypeocrisy 9mo ago[dead]
- meursault334 9mo agoI tried this in the cursor terminal and it now flickers periodically but not like crazy.
- laughingcurve 9mo agoPossibly the greatest contribution to Claude code in months. I am rushing to my terminal to install, test, and update.
- headcanon 9mo agoTHANK YOU! that flickering is giving me a headache. You're doing the lords work! Anthropic: Please fix this ASAP
- benzible 9mo agoI would love to use this but it breaks Ghostty's native scrollback (two-finger scroll), which I want more than I want to solve the flickering. The PTY proxy intercepts the output stream so Ghostty can't access its internal scrollback buffer anymore.
- foltik 9mo agoMaybe try tmux? There’s no smooth scrolling, but there’s lots of other bells and whistles I wouldn’t give up for that.
- thethimble 9mo agoOr even zellij > tmux
- foltik 9mo agoI wanted to believe, but wasn’t able to get most of my config working the same in zellij since it has fewer configuration knobs. Tried writing a plugin, but even those can’t touch much of the internal state. Particularly the keybinds I remember not being able to replicate (smart resizing, respecting vim, context sensitivity): https://github.com/foltik/dots/blob/main/config/tmux.conf https://github.com/foltik/dots/blob/main/config/tmux.conf
- bmurphy1976 9mo agoHow does Ghostty break scroll? I've never noticed this and I just tested, seems to work fine. My problem is the lack of a scrollbar but I know they are working on that.
- benzible 9mo agoThis is a thread about Claude Chill. I said that Claude Chill breaks scrollback on ghostty.
- internet2000 9mo agoThe readme.md format and conventions being a tell that this got written by Claude Code itself makes the whole thing Chef's kiss. I love the future.
- behnamoh 9mo ago> this got written by Claude Code nit but CC itself doesn't write anything, much like a body w/o brain doesn't program anything. it's possible the OP was using other models like codex/gemini/etc. in CC.
- roywiggins 9mo agoIt's possible it's from some other model or even a human, but it reads like every other Claude Code readme I've seen.
- behnamoh 9mo agoso then it could be written by a claude model inside opencode before anthropic got angry about it :)
- phist_mcgee 9mo agoOh my god who cares?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- LowLevelBasket 9mo agoI guess it's not hard to use AI to improve your productivity by 10x when your code is written by 0.1x devs. It's embarrassing an OSS fixed their problem before they did after all that money they raised
- esafak 9mo agoI don't know if this is my problem but formatting has been completely broken recently. It feels ... vibe coded. I wish they had not blocked opencode :(
- gastonmorixe 9mo agojust make the font-size smaller, and smaller, and smaller... until no more flickering.
- ossa-ma 9mo agoOne feature I'd love is a toggle to lock the input to the bottom of the terminal. It's a big inconvenience to have to scroll up and down between the chat and the input when responding to changes.
- teruakohatu 9mo agoI was just thinking that half a hour ago when using Claude via tmux via mosh via my phone. It would be a game changer for mobile usage.
- petemc_ 9mo agoI initially thought this was by David Beazley, the python/rust guy.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- venturecruelty 9mo agoWhy didn't they just ask Claude to fix it?
- elboru 9mo agoI read the other day that one of their devs has a vanilla CC setup that consists of 10 agents running in parallel. Why doesn’t he just ask one of those agents to fix it??
- dang 9mo agoRelated (I think?): We've rewritten Claude Code's terminal rendering to reduce flickering by 85% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312507 - Dec 2025 (3 comments)
- chrislloyd 9mo agoHi! I work on TUI rendering for Claude Code. I know this has been a long-standing frustration — it's taken longer than any of us wanted. The good news: we shipped our differential renderer to everyone today. We rewrote our rendering system from scratch[1] and only ~1/3 of sessions see at least a flicker. Very, very few sessions see flickers in rapid succession which was so annoying before. Those numbers will keep dropping as people update. We've also been working upstream to add synchronized output / DEC mode 2026 support to environments where CC runs and have had patches accepted to VSCode's terminal[2] and tmux[3]. Synchronized output totally eliminates flickering. As always, I recommend using Ghostty which has 2026 support and zero flicker. Happy to answer questions! [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issuecomment-3667315590 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issueco... [2]: https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/pull/5453 https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/pull/5453 [3]: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/pull/4744 https://github.com/tmux/tmux/pull/4744
- elliot07 9mo agoWhy has public comms been so poor on this issue? There's been lots of Github issues posted in the Claude Code repo with lots of new comments each day screaming into the void, but radio silence from Anthropic since the revert in December. It's clearly causing a lot of frustration for users leading to clever workarounds like this. It was obviously a complex issue (I appreciate that and your work!). But I think there's a lot to be improved on with communication. This issue in particular seems like it has lost a lot of user trust - not because it was hard to solve and took awhile - but because the comms and progress around it was so limited. Eg issues: * https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1913 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1913 * https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/826 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/826 * https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648
- chrislloyd 9mo agoThe communication is definitely on me! There honestly wasn't much new to say -I've been slowly ramping since early Jan just to be extra sure there's no regressions. The main two perf. issues were: 1. Since we no longer have <Static> components the app re-renders much more frequently with larger component trees. We were seeing unusual GC pauses because of having too much JSX... Better memoization has largely solved that. 2. The new renderer double buffers and blits similar cells between the front and back buffer to reduce memory pressure. However, we were still seeing large GC pauses from that so I ended up converting the screen buffer to packed TypedArrays.
- 3ln00b 9mo agoCodex is so much more responsive for me no matter how long the session is running. Claude just starts stuttering badly when the session is running for sometime.
- myko 9mo agoCodex is written in Rust IIRC, probably makes a pretty big difference
- myko 9mo agoFrustrating that the best agentic coding tool is such a bloated mess. I'm surprised they don't have a non-JS version ready for release.
- schrodinger 9mo agoWrite it in Go!
- DanOpcode 9mo agoWhat is the flickering issue? Sometimes Claude Code scrolls up far away, and I struggle to scroll it down again. And I have to restart the terminal and Claude Code for it to behave well again. But I don't know if this is the flickering issue, or if it's due to a bug in Windows, Alacritty, Zsh or something else.
- hmokiguess 9mo agoThank you, that's the primary issue I have too, I'm surprised it's not being talked more here in this thread. I am on iTerm2 in macOS so not specific to your environment. It's really annoying and restarting doesn't fix it in my case, only a fresh session.
- esperent 9mo agoI was having this issue with Claude code, and even worse with Gemini, while using the VSCode terminal. I switched to Ghostty and I don't have any flickering or weird scrolling issues at all anymore.