[FEATURE] VS Code Extension: option to disable auto-collapsing of user prompts in chat history

Status Closed — not planned

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 5 comments · opened Apr 2, 2026 · closed Jun 3, 2026

Summary

In the VS Code extension, multiline user prompts are collapsed behind a "Show more" button in the conversation history. There's no setting to control or disable this behavior.

Problem

When reviewing a conversation, collapsed prompts make it hard to see what was actually said without clicking "Show more" on each one. For users who write detailed, multiline prompts — particularly those using Claude Code as an ongoing collaborative partner rather than a quick task runner — the conversation history becomes a wall of collapsed blocks that require individual clicks to review.

This is a regression relative to the CLI / Terminal UI, which displays the full text of user prompts in the conversation history without collapsing them. The VS Code extension appears to be the only Claude Code surface that truncates user input this way.

Requested behavior

A setting (e.g. claude-code.autoCollapseUserPrompts: boolean or a configurable line threshold) to control whether user messages are collapsed in the chat panel. Ideally, the default would match the CLI behavior (show full text), with an opt-in collapse for users who prefer it.

Related issues

#39809 / #38674 — "Show more/less" toggle behavior
#11334 — configurable auto-collapse threshold for bash output
#3412 — pasted text collapsing

View original on GitHub ↗

5 Comments

j-p-c · 6 months ago

Follow-up with more observations over two days of use. The "Show more" button behavior is wildly non-deterministic:

Sometimes hovering over the collapsed prompt box shows the button. Sometimes you need to hover over where the button would appear — it's not there until your cursor happens to land on the right pixel.
In one instance, the button only appeared when hovering over a faint gray "prompt" label in the bottom-left corner of the box — not anywhere else.
The button sometimes appears at the end of the last visible line of text (middle of the box, or slightly right of center) rather than in the bottom-right corner.
Mid-session, all boxes spontaneously uncollapsed with "Show less" buttons — no user action triggered this.
The behavior varies enough across observations that it's unclear whether this is a single stable bug or something being iterated on server-side.

This is worth a thorough investigation — the non-determinism suggests either a race condition in the layout/rendering code, or the button positioning logic is depending on something unstable (viewport size, content length, render timing).

asterixjm · 5 months ago

Agreed - this needs investigation

github-actions[bot] · 4 months ago

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.

ametemre · 4 months ago

This issue is still onthe table, github-actions(bot) adjust your prefences this problem is still alive... and the issue persists if you send a long prompt too... annoying, i cant see the model results chat page is stalled !

github-actions[bot] · 1 month ago

This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.