Transcript view lacks internal scrolling — unusable via keyboard, relies on terminal backbuffer
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Apr 14, 2026 by gburman-atpco Closed Apr 18, 2026
Problem
The Transcript view (Ctrl+O) has no internal scroll handling. It relies entirely on the terminal emulator or multiplexer (e.g., tmux) to scroll the rendered output. This means:
- No keyboard scrolling at all. Arrow keys, Page Up/Down, and custom keybindings in the
Scrollcontext have no effect. TheScrollcontext is documented as applying to "fullscreen layout" which doesn't appear to exist in the CLI.
- Mouse/trackpad scrolling only works indirectly. In tmux with
mouse on, trackpad scrolling works but only because tmux is scrolling its own backbuffer — not because Claude Code is handling it. Withmouse off(a common tmux config), nothing scrolls at all.
- Long conversations are inaccessible. Because scrolling depends on the tmux/terminal backbuffer (which has a finite
history-limit), earlier parts of a long conversation cannot be reached in the Transcript view.
Expected behavior
The Transcript view should handle scrolling internally, like less or any well-behaved TUI application. It should:
- Support keyboard scrolling (at minimum arrow keys, Page Up/Down)
- Respect the
Scrollcontext keybindings (e.g.,ctrl+f/ctrl+bfor page scroll,ctrl+u/ctrl+dfor half-page) - Not depend on the terminal's backbuffer for scroll range
Environment
- Claude Code CLI in Alacritty + tmux (also tested in macOS Terminal.app)
- macOS
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