Garbled / flickering terminal output — page 3
Escape-sequence handling corrupts the rendered TUI in some terminals.
889 issues · 98 open · 791 resolved (89%) · first seen Feb 26, 2025
First response · integration
What to do now
Most likely: A local integration or child process did not satisfy Claude Code’s expected contract.
- Isolate the failing MCP server, shell command or editor integration.
- Run that dependency directly and capture its exit code and stderr.
- Compare with a clean configuration before editing global settings.
These are conservative triage steps, not an official Anthropic fix. Use the issue and workaround evidence below before making a destructive configuration change.
Is this getting better or worse?
This class of problem is converging. 145 new reports in the last 90 days vs 288 in the 90 before — -50%. The open backlog peaked at 151 in 2026-07 and sits at 98 today.
Derived by counting each matching issue from its creation date until it closed. First-party
computation over the anthropics/claude-code tracker — the trend is not published
anywhere upstream.
Which builds report this
493 of these reports name the Claude Code build they were running, spanning 165 releases. Heaviest reporters:
- Claude Code v2.1.92
- Claude Code v2.0.76
- Claude Code v2.1.90
- Claude Code v2.1.220
- Claude Code v2.1.37
- Claude Code v2.1.119
- Claude Code v2.1.63
- Claude Code v2.0.73
Report volume, not a defect count: an issue can mention a build without that build having caused the failure. Versions come from the version string in the bug-report template, matched against real published tags.
Do these get fixed?
Median time to close is 29 days across 791 closures. Of the 791 closures with a recorded reason, 19% were closed as completed and 640 as not-planned or duplicate. The most recent completed fix landed in 2026-10.
Workarounds reported by the community
264 of these issues post a workaround someone says worked. The highest-engagement ones:
- [BUG] In-progress Call causes Screen Flickering
- @bcherny Not write tool, Claude created a here document to workaround not wanting to read the existing file. Not using verbose mode. --- │ Settings │ │ Configure Claude Code preferences │ │ │ │ ❯ Auto-compact true │ │ │…
Found in the thread of #769 · still open - Terminal Flickering
- In case someone is looking for a workaround, for some reason enabling "Maximize throughput at the cost of higher latency" option in iTerm2 (latest beta, not sure if that matters) stopped flickering on it's tracks, as soo…
Found in the thread of #1913 · still open - [BUG] Terminal rendering corruption in tmux - text overlaps and overwrites previous output
- …ut. The corruption persists until the session is restarted. Workaround Only reliable fix is or restarting the session. Related Issues - 769 — Screen flickering caused by full-buffer redraw on status indicator updates - 8…
Found in the description of #29937 · still open - [FEATURE] Video Input Support in Claude Code
- …of course, that's exactly what I've done also, but it is a workaround, not a real solution.
Found in the thread of #12676 · still open - [BUG] After the recent updates Claude Code jumps and loses track of scroll position in Terminal window
- ~~A workaround for iTerm2 until the issue is properly fixed in Claude Code:~~ ~~Settings - Advanced - Terminal - disable "App may turn on Focus Reporting"~~ UPD. It appears the issue wasn't reproducing for me in certain…
Found in the thread of #18299 · resolved
Excerpts are quoted from the linked issue so you can judge relevance before opening it. Threads that only ask for a workaround, or report that there is none, are excluded. These are community suggestions, not official guidance from Anthropic — read the full thread before applying one.
Matching issues 201–300
Ranked by community engagement (reactions weighted over comments). Listing the top 300 of 889 matches; the statistics above cover all 889.
- Model emitted orphan \uD83A surrogate + garbled Korean inside AskUserQuestion, bricking session
- [BUG] [Agent View] Persistent flicker and broken input on Windows Terminal + Git Bash with CJK (v2.1.145)
- Branch-activity panel above prompt grows indefinitely; no setting to hide
- [DOCS] Worktree docs omit mid-session command behavior for `/tui` and `/update`
- [Feature Request] Improve terminal scrolling performance in VS Code integration
- [Bug] Claude Code not following skill instructions
- No-flicker mode breaks Korean (CJK) text copy on Windows Terminal
- Permission prompt garbles ~/.claude path as ~/.claire
- Dynamic terminal tab title showing current task context
- TUI misalignment caused by string-width miscalculating emoji character width on macOS 12
- Scroll jumps to top in Cursor terminal + PowerShell during streaming/resize
- GPG signing prompt conflicts with Claude Code TUI during git commit
- [BUG] v2.1.23 causes VS Code Extension Host to pin ~30% CPU while idle, cursor flickering, unusable chat panels
- Screen flickering persists in v2.1.19 on WSL2 Ubuntu 22 and Windows 10 CMD
- [BUG] Console window hangs when claude is running more than one subagent
- [BUG] Add automatic paging for long command outputs
- [Bug] CLI output flickers and becomes unresponsive to user input
- [BUG] SGR mouse-report fragments (e.g. `;35;44M`) leak into the prompt as text when the session is busy — no focus switch or external editor
- Claude in Chrome (v1.0.80): list_connected_browsers is stale/cached, isLocal misreports host, and name↔deviceId can't be joined
- Conversation stuck showing RUNNING while idle, blocking other conversations
- [Bug][cyber] Safety block stopped a benign session after garbled non-cyber shell input with no security task (req_011CcPJBZk3cWahVf2aYsshi)
- VS Code extension host becomes unresponsive (1-2.5 min) while claude.exe --resume loads a large session
- Vim-mode-aware keybinding contexts: ctrl+u scroll binding collides with insert-mode line editing in fullscreen
- Allow /tui screen mode in background sessions on Windows (agent-view workflow has no garbling workaround)
- [BUG] Native binary crashes with 'trap invalid opcode' on AVX-512 capable CPU inside KVM VM (v2.1.116–2.1.119)
- Duplicate console output across multiple independent projects (macOS)
- Opus 4.7 regression: weaker keyboard-language typo detection + less precise memory/MD file writes vs Opus 4.6
- /usage panel renders incompletely on v2.1.114; CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 is a workaround
- Usage indicator randomly flickers between different percentages
- [BUG] Opus 4.6 generation corruption + usage policy violation — third account, ~4 hours after #45712 cluster (v2.1.96)
- Model produces garbled multilingual tokens + hallucinated fictional content after large subagent web research
- Add option to suppress "X% until auto-compact" footer label
- [Bug] Korean text output garbled when copied from Windows Terminal (TUI rendering mojibake)
- Voice mode: Space push-to-talk flickers on Windows Terminal + WSL2 due to key repeat
- Voice dictation requires unnaturally slow speech; degrades with duration; same mic works fine in Google Docs
- Exit summary has garbled text from TUI status area
- Garbled Chinese characters (U+FFFD) in streaming output near Markdown formatting markers
- Terminal rendering corruption (garbled/overlapping characters) in v2.1.83
- Terminal rendering causes severe flickering in tmux and multiplexed terminals
- [BUG] sudden nonsense responses all over the CLI version.
- [BUG] TUI rendering corruption during parallel sub-agent execution — garbled text, dropped characters, overlapping UI elements (v2.1.69)
- Bug: /memory UI shows garbled ANSI escape characters when selecting option
- [BUG] **Session transcript writes to wrong JSONL file — cross-session data corruption**
- [Bug] Terminal flickering regression in v2.1.42
- Korean (한글) IME input broken in remote terminals (e.g., Termius via SSH)
- [Bug] German language regression — English words leak into German responses + grammar errors (2026-01-28)
- [BUG] Thai language input not processing correctly in CLI
- [BUG] /context not working as it used to
- [BUG] Status line: current_usage flickers to null during slash commands and @ mentions
- [BUG] `/release-notes` command displays excessive whitespace
- [BUG] CLI scrolls to the top of the session when right-clicking highlighted text during agent interaction
- [BUG] TUI input broken on macOS: cursor position responses (^[[row;colR]) leak to display instead of being consumed
- [Bug] UI flickering and auto-scroll to top during parallel subagent execution
- [BUG] Prompt input displays corrupted characters in Windows Terminal (v2.0.73)
- [ARCHITECTURE] MCP-Based Multi-Agent Communication - Replace Tmux
- [Feature Request] Stream model output in real-time during generation
- [Bug] Scrolling flickering causes VS Code crash on frequent intervals
- [Bug] Terminal display flickering during execution
- [Bug] Terminal UI flickering with unresponsive escape key
- [Bug] Terminal Display Corruption During Extended Use
- Unicode Codepoint Corruption During Write Operation
- Persistent UI Flickering on Command Line Paste Input
- [BUG] Unicode box-drawing characters Γò¡ΓöÇΓöÇΓöÇΓ
- [BUG] Claude Code generated garbled response with apparent training data leak
- [FEATURE] Preserve ANSI color in assistant-authored text (or expand tool output by default) for text-based terminal plotting
- [BUG] Fullscreen: scroll-back sticky "last prompt" banner never appears since 2.1.247 (scrollRef -> scrollViewport.handle refactor)
- [BUG] Korean text in AskUserQuestion widget renders as garbled valid-looking Hangul (VS Code extension)
- Rebinding `enter` to `chat:newline` makes `chat:submit` silently fail while the autocomplete list is open
- [Feature Request] Reimplement Claude Code in pure Rust to eliminate CPU spikes and terminal flickering
- [Bug] Claude Code output contains severe text corruption and character garbling
- [FEATURE] Fullscreen TUI Ctrl+R only searches the last 100 prompts — restore classic renderer's full-history exact search
- [Bug] Cmd+click file paths not opening in fullscreen TUI on Warp (macOS)
- [Bug] UI rendering broken with overlapping text and buffer corruption in v2.1.202
- Resumed subagent (SendMessage) detail panel renders garbled transcript: turns inverted, and raw SendMessage envelope shown on reopen
- [BUG] Custom statusLine never renders when `tui` is set to `fullscreen` (macOS, 2.1.170)
- [BUG] VS Code "Toggle Maximized Panel" command flickers and fails when Claude Code extension is active
- Python file I/O snippets should always include encoding='utf-8' to prevent silent data corruption on Windows (follow-up to #62828)
- [Bug] Background daemon supervisor respawns every ~52s on macOS Apple Silicon, causing agent disconnects and task failures
- [BUG] VS Code: Claude Code tab flickers/minimizes briefly when switching to it
- SessionEnd hook killed before completing on exit ("Hook cancelled") — EXIT trap never runs, no configurable grace [2.1.187, tui: fullscreen]
- [Bug] UI flickering in resumed sessions with longer conversation histories
- Subagents return fully hallucinated results with zero tool calls; leaked tool-call XML in text; two fabricated 'prompt injection detected' reports
- [BUG] Canceling ExitPlanMode leaves terminal output broken
- [Bug] Parallel tool batch cancels all remaining calls when one call fails
- [Bug] Tool output returning garbled/hallucinated content causing token waste
- [Bug] VSCode terminal output displays corrupted text with garbled symbols
- [Bug] REPL text flickering/blinking display issue
- CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1: long menus clipped at terminal bottom
- "Jump to bottom ↓" included in text selection/copy in fullscreen mode
- [BUG] CJK IME multi-character commit causes text flickering/jumping in Alacritty (bracketed paste mode)
- [Bug] CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER disables cursor navigation keyboard shortcuts (Alt/Cmd + arrows/backspace)
- Cowork UI: messages render out-of-order / require scroll to find — regression on 1.569.0
- [Bug] CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 swallows Ctrl+J keybinding for chat:newline in tmux
- CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 causes duplicated output and garbled Unicode on Windows
- [BUG] Documentation gap: EDITOR subprocess receives CSI-u mode 2
- Unnecessary scroll-to-bottom on edit acceptance when `acceptEdits` is enabled
- [BUG] Voice mode does not recognize Russian speech
- [BUG] Freezes terminal most of the time when trying to access anything remotely related to tty devices
- RTL (Right-to-Left) text rendering is broken in VS Code extension
- [BUG] Terminal blinks/flickers when pasting long messages in tmux