[BUG] Ubuntu/Gnome terminal screen flickering

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1486
2. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14140
3. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

@marcindulak it looks like your terminal is slightly too short and the bash output is rendering offscreen. Also Gnome Terminal uses VTE which doesn't have support yet for synchronized output commands. I suggest either making your terminal taller or using a terminal emulator like Ghostty which does support synchronized output commands.

I can confirm that I see no flickering with Ghostty 1.2.3 on the above test case, with the same terminal and font size.

I'd love to try out Ghostty but they don't support Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

@chrislloyd any other hacks you might recommend?

To me it looks like ghostty is available on Ubuntu 22.04 (at least x86_64) as snap https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary#snap, AppImage may also work.

<img width="750" height="172" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9a898f51-ea21-4768-b210-4f84303b2525" />

This worked!

Installed Ghostty on Ubuntu 22.04 via Snap.

Here's a cool screenshot with semi-transparent window, and otherwise default settings:
<img width="1161" height="829" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/57778bbe-81b2-43d3-9971-9ff2b9943ebe" />

Thank you @marcindulak. Merry Christmas!

Update: On 2025-12-27, I'm on 2.0.73 (Claude Code) with Ghostty 1.2.3, having in ~/.config/ghostty/config

window-width = 140
window-height = 35
font-size = 16
scrollback-limit = 1000000

and experience flickering during long conversations that generate large outputs.
On the other hand, the original test case of Run: bash scripts/test_unit.sh, run even ten times does not produce flickering.

It's unclear to me what got "reverted" https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issuecomment-3688503436. I don't see a mention of this in CHANGELOG.md (but there are only 2.0.73, and 2.0.74 entries in CHANGELOG.md, and the lastest available Claude Code is 2.0.76).

Is reduction in flickering still active for Ghostty with 2.0.73, or is the change that improved flickering behind some feature flags that Anthropic reverted?

I don't know what to think about that, but since I experienced flickering with Ghostty, I'm asking @chrislloyd whether you could explain the current state of flickering on Ghostty on Ubuntu.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/782845c3-94f4-4918-a7fb-e798efd28669

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