[FEATURE]

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Problem Statement

Problem Statement
Claude Code's input prompt lacks standard text editing capabilities that users expect from modern terminal applications, making it extremely frustrating to edit prompts — especially longer ones.
Current issues:

No mouse click positioning: Clicking somewhere in the middle of a typed prompt does not move the cursor to that position. The cursor is always stuck at the end of the line.
No selection-aware editing: When text is selected (via Shift+Arrow or mouse drag), pressing Backspace or Delete only removes a single character instead of the entire selection.
No familiar keyboard shortcuts: Standard shortcuts like Ctrl+A (select all), Ctrl+X (cut selection), and Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right (select word by word) either don't work or don't behave as expected.
Painful correction workflow: To fix a typo in the middle of a long prompt, users must backspace through all the text after the typo, fix it, and then retype everything. There is no way to simply click on the typo and correct it in place.

This is especially painful because the native terminal (PowerShell 7 with PSReadLine in Windows Terminal) supports all of these features perfectly. The gap between the native prompt experience and Claude Code's input prompt is jarring when using them side by side in the same terminal window.
As a result, users are forced to either hold backspace and retype large portions of their prompt to fix a single typo, write prompts in an external text editor and paste them in, or just accept the typo and hope Claude understands the intent. None of these are acceptable workflows for a modern developer tool.
Environment: Windows 11, Windows Terminal, PowerShell 7, PSReadLine enabled with EditMode: Windows.

Proposed Solution

Proposed Solution
The input prompt should support standard text-editing operations, similar to how PSReadLine works in PowerShell 7:

Mouse click → moves cursor to the clicked position within the input
Mouse click + drag → selects text
Shift+Arrow keys → selects text character by character
Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right → selects text word by word
Ctrl+A → selects entire input
Backspace/Delete with active selection → deletes the selected text
Ctrl+X → cuts selected text
Ctrl+C (with selection) → copies selected text
Ctrl+V → pastes and replaces selected text if a selection is active
Home/End → moves cursor to start/end of line
Double-click → selects a word

This could be achieved by integrating a more capable input library that supports these features natively. Some options include xterm.js addons for enhanced input handling, or a custom readline implementation that hooks into terminal mouse events via terminal escape sequences, or integration with the terminal's built-in selection so that selected text is recognized by the input handler.
PSReadLine in PowerShell 7 proves that this level of input editing is fully achievable in a terminal environment.

Alternative Solutions

Alternative Solution
If full text-editor-style editing is too complex to implement in the short term, even partial improvements would be a significant quality-of-life upgrade:

Selection-aware delete: At minimum, if text is selected, pressing Backspace/Delete should remove the entire selection instead of a single character. This alone would save users a huge amount of frustration.
Click-to-position cursor: Supporting mouse click to reposition the cursor within the input line, even without full selection support, would make fixing typos dramatically easier.
Open in editor command: A built-in shortcut (e.g., Ctrl+E or Alt+E) that opens the current input in the user's default text editor (like $EDITOR or VS Code), lets them edit freely, and then sends the result back to Claude Code when saved and closed. This is similar to how PSReadLine's ViEditVisually function works.

Any one of these would be a meaningful step forward compared to the current experience.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

Always when using Claude Code.

Additional Context

_No response_