[FEATURE] Option to keep conversation visible when using Ctrl-G external editor

I came here to report roughly the same issue, except that my proposed solution was a little different.
This often comes up when Claude's response has been long, perhaps there are several points within it, and sometimes I even wish to respond to those multiple points.
What I often do now, is copy Claude's response, Ctrl-g to open my editor, and then paste the response I had copied. That way I can see in the editor Claude's response. Sometimes I write my response and then delete the copy-and-pasted Claude response, sometimes I quote some or all of that response so that it is clear which part of the response I am now responding to.
So basically, my proposed solution is to either add another key-control or an option to allow Ctrl-g to open the editor with Claude's latest response quoted within it.

I was experiencing the exact same issue and came up with a solutuion.
I built a helper tool that keeps transcript context visible while opening an external GUI editor, so editing doesn’t blank the TUI state.

It’s effectively instantaneous in my setup (<5ms to first render), and it also upgrades output with OSC-8 hyperlinks so file/web links are clickable in supported terminals.
I'm still working on achieving true 1-to-1 visual parity with the claude code conversation including diffs but for now it's made using ctrl-g much more manageable.

Repo: https://github.com/gradigit/claude-pager

Before:
<img width="400" height="300" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/234c6467-cd44-4458-acc2-12e6577785d7" />

After:
<img width="400" height="300" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/034714ab-ffe9-4fcb-8e07-f4def76a91f9" />

For what it's worth the OpenAI codex does not suffer from this problem. This is one of few areas where Claude Code looks less polished than the competition.

I wonder what the rationale is for hiding it in the first place even is? I get that the prompt input is kinda strange to keep visible, but that could be cleared / replaced by a "<edited in editor>" placeholder easily...

Source-level root cause analysis

I've been investigating this issue for a custom macOS GUI editor (resomark --wait) and can confirm the exact mechanism from the v2.1.86 binary (offset ~187532800):

// Hardcoded GUI editor whitelist
p6K = ["code","cursor","windsurf","codium","subl","atom","gedit","notepad++","notepad"]

// Terminal editor regex
B6K = /\b(vi|vim|nvim|nano|emacs|pico|micro|helix|hx)\b/

// Detection: basename includes() match
function X88(H) {
  let _ = require("path").basename(H.split(" ")[0] ?? "");
  return p6K.find(q => _.includes(q));
}

// The branching logic (Ctrl+G handler)
function DV(H) {
  let $ = YV();              // reads $VISUAL or $EDITOR
  let K = !F6K($);           // not in whitelist?
  if (K)
    q.enterAlternateScreen();  // → TUI disappears
  else
    q.pause(), q.suspendStdin();  // → TUI stays visible
}

Any $EDITOR whose basename doesn't includes() one of the 9 whitelisted strings gets enterAlternateScreen(). There's no heuristic detection of GUI vs terminal editors.

Verification

I ran 11 controlled experiments to rule out process-level explanations before finding this:

| Hypothesis | Result |
|------------|--------|
| NSRunLoop vs raw read() blocking | ❌ No effect |
| stdio detachment (dup2 to /dev/null) | ❌ No effect |
| Session detachment (setsid()) | ❌ No effect |
| AppKit/NSApplication registration | ❌ No effect |
| Bash wrapper around subl -w | ✅ Works (because basename subl-wrapper.sh includes "subl") |

The wrapper result is the smoking gun — a shell script named subl-wrapper.sh calling sleep 999 would keep the TUI visible purely because of the filename.

Proposed solution

A user-declarable setting would solve this for all GUI editors:

{
  "editorMode": "gui"
}

Or a user-extensible whitelist:

{
  "guiEditors": ["resomark", "cot", "bbedit", "zed", "neovide"]
}

Either approach is minimal and backwards-compatible — the existing hardcoded list becomes the default, users can extend it for their editor of choice.