Feature request: option to disable streamed response output
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 3 comments · opened Mar 22, 2026
Summary
Add an option to disable real-time streaming of responses in the interactive CLI, instead displaying the complete response once generation finishes.
Motivation
Watching text stream token-by-token can be distracting and makes it harder to focus on other work while waiting for a response. A "batch" or "quiet" output mode would let users get the final result without the visual noise of incremental rendering.
Proposed solution
A configuration option (e.g., --no-stream flag or a streamResponse: false setting in settings.json) that buffers the response and displays it all at once when generation completes. A simple spinner or progress indicator could replace the streaming text while waiting.
3 Comments
I'd appreciate this as well. Would be great to see an environment variable or similar.
I am desiring this feature as well.
+1 — also worth framing this as an accessibility issue, not just a focus/aesthetics one. The continuous motion is genuinely hard on the eyes for users with motion sensitivity or visual processing differences, and is exactly the kind of thing OS-level "reduce motion" settings exist to address. Would be natural to either extend
prefersReducedMotionto suppress streaming or add a separate"streamResponses": falsekey. (The existingprefersReducedMotioncovers spinners/shimmer, andCLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKERis scrollback-only — neither addresses token streaming.)