Option to hide inline diffs for Edit/Write tool output
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in thread ↓
Activity 34 comments · opened Mar 23, 2026
Add a setting to suppress the inline diff display that appears in the conversation stream when the Edit or Write tool modifies a file.
The diff dialog (Escape to dismiss) exists, but there's no way to hide the diffs that appear inline during file edits. A setting like "showDiffs": false in settings.json would be useful for users who prefer cleaner output and trust the changes being made.
34 Comments
Found 3 possible duplicate issues:
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🤖 Generated with Claude Code
Would love to see this too, Claude will often say something insightful which is quickly wiped out by 30 lines of output from
Bash(<some_cmd>).+1 to this!
+1
If we want to stay minimal, maybe we could have a
pi.on("tool_render", ...)extension point for overriding only the rendering?For the love of bacon, please implement something like this!
I have to correct myself. Pi agent examples have an extension with custom tool output rendering, so I was able to do all customizations I wanted.
There is also an example of what is called minimal mode, which hides tool's output.
+1, please 🙏🙏🙏
Yes, please
+1
would be much cleaner
+1 on this. Adding a concrete reason why the existing
/focusview isn't a substitute:The only native way to collapse Edit/Write diffs today is fullscreen rendering (
tui: fullscreen) +/focus. But fullscreen uses the terminal's alternate screen, so the terminal scrollback history is lost on exit — for users who rely on inline scrollback, fullscreen is a non-starter, which makes/focusunusable for this purpose.A
"showDiffs": false(or"collapseDiffs": "summary"showing a one-lineEdited foo.py +3 -1) that works in the default inline renderer without requiring fullscreen would close the gap. Today "clean output" and "preserved terminal scrollback" are mutually exclusive; this setting would decouple them.This would be a nice feature for people that uses Claude Code as a 'second brain assistant' (I don't want to read the changes on the .md files). Thanks.
+1 for this. Codex does a great job on this and a much cleaner output
Yes please. I would love this feature.
Adding my support for this. When I use Claude Code in the terminal, the output is jarring compared to when I use it in the Claude Desktop application (which hides file edits by default). I'd really love to hide diffs in the output so I can focus on the conversation.
+1. The diffs cause tons of noise while trying to scroll through to read Claude's actual thinking output
Also adding support for this
One piece of information the thread doesn't have yet: the condensed renderer this asks for already exists in the binary. It just isn't reachable from a setting.
In 2.1.263 the tool-result renderer takes a
styleparameter, and thecreate/updatebranches already short-circuit the diff whenstyle === "condensed"and verbose is off, printingWrote N lines to <path>instead. That path is currently only wired to internal collapsed views — the "Showing last N tool uses" group — so it never fires during a normal turn.So this is plumbing an existing code path to a user setting rather than writing a new renderer.
For anyone landing here looking for a workaround in the meantime: there isn't one.
/configin 2.1.263 has no diff-display option; the only diff-adjacent knobs arediffTool(terminal/auto, which moves the approval diff to an IDE tab when one is connected) andsyntaxHighlightingDisabled(removes colour, same number of lines). Neither reduces the vertical space the post-edit diff takes in the stream.The
Ctrl+Shift+Btranscript toggle hides whole messages rather than diffs specifically, which is a blunter instrument than what's being requested here.~ Automated via Claude
I'd like to add my use case here as well. When working on larger refactors or multi-file changes in the CLI, the diff panel adds a lot of visual noise and makes it harder to follow the conversational flow of the session. I trust Claude's edits in most cases and would rather review changes afterward via git diff than have the full diff rendered inline every time.
A setting like showDiffs: false or diffDisplay: "collapsed" in settings.json (as proposed above) would solve this well — ideally with a one-line summary option (e.g. "Edited file.ts — 12 lines changed") for cases where I still want a quick signal without the full diff.
It would also be great to have a keyboard shortcut or slash command to toggle the diff panel on/off during a session, rather than only a static config option — that way it's easy to peek at a diff when needed without permanently changing the setting. Would appreciate seeing this prioritized.
I'm using Claude code inside the Orca ADE, which already has a clean git changes view. The one inside Claude code, in this case, is just a lot of visual noise which makes it harder to focus on the conversation.
Wanted to add a +1 to this. It's very hard to find what I want to see in the scroll back with all these huge, non-collapsable Update/Edit diffs polluting the scrollback. I generally don't care about these things most of the time.
+1 love this in codex and even agy
how is this not a feature yet? lol
+1 this should be on top of the enhancement list. There are so many other ways to see diffs this is plain noise in a n otherwise valuable conversation
I've suddenly found Claude Code (CLI) posting full diffs of every file that changes _when it checks out a new Git branch_. This is _highly_ misleading, as it is indistinguishable from Claude reading/writing files unless you look closely at which CLI command ran before the diff. I don't want to see a full diff between whatever branch Claude was on and what it's now on every time it changes branches, that's a huge amount of clutter in my chat for no value whatsoever.
Would love for this feature or at least something like Ctrl+T to toggle collapsing expanding diffs. Diffs expanded by default.
EDIT: #80720
SOLVED
Ask claude code directly to build itself a mod to exclude diff results from appearing, or collapse into a single line of +/-. ask to load on start. reopen terminal. done!
@gixxy22 Can you please publish the mod in a GitHub (or other hosted) repository? Thanks!
You can try out mine if you want.
https://github.com/akilin/claude-plugins
Note that the plugin currently does more than hide diffs for Edit/Write tool output.
Full list of changes:
Example of how it looks (ignore the prompt bubbles, that is a separate plugin in the same repo):
!A session with better-tool-rows and prompt-bubbles
Same session, without plugin (zoomed out to fit in a single screenshot):
!The same session without the plugin
enjoy
https://github.com/gixxy22/hide-diffs
Solved with a mod: https://github.com/Egrn/claude-code-mutedit — Ditch the diff cut the riff, no more edits less of credits. One grey line per edit instead of the diff (Edit, Write, NotebookEdit, and files a Bash command changed); toggle with
/mutedit.Nice and useful addition. I took the liberty of changing the color to cyan
on my local install.
Thank you very myuch.
Em sáb., 10 de out. de 2026 às 13:04, egrn @.***>
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