Blockquote rendering in dark terminal is visually painful — needs block-level background

Problem

Blockquote rendering (> markdown) in dark terminal themes applies the inverse/highlight background color only to the text characters and inline spaces, not to the entire block area. This creates a jagged, "chainsaw" visual effect where the background color starts and stops at every line boundary, with sharp edges everywhere.

The result is extremely hard to read in dark terminal themes — your eyes can't focus on the words because the high-contrast background fragments are visually overwhelming.

Current Behavior

Each line of a blockquote gets its own individually-highlighted text span. Spaces between words get the background, but the padding/margins around the block do not. The visual is choppy — like a series of inline <span> elements with background color rather than one cohesive block.

Expected Behavior

Treat the blockquote as a block-level element — apply the background color to the entire rectangular area of the quote, not just the individual characters. Think CSS display: block with background-color and padding, not display: inline with background on each character.

The entire quote — including the whitespace, line breaks, and padding — should have a uniform background, creating one clean rectangle instead of a jagged mess of highlighted text fragments.

Environment

• Claude Code CLI (iTerm2, dark theme)
• macOS
• CommonMark rendering with monospace font

Workaround

Currently avoiding blockquotes entirely in Claude output because they're unreadable in dark terminal. Using plain text or other formatting instead.

Visual Description

Imagine a paragraph where every line has its background color stop exactly at the last character, then resume at the first character of the next line. The left and right edges are ragged because lines have different lengths. There's no visual cohesion — it looks like someone highlighted text with a marker that keeps lifting off the page.

A screenshot will be attached in comments showing the actual rendering.

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Filed via Claude Code session on behalf of user