[FEATURE] Conversation minimap / input marker bar for quick navigation

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened May 23, 2026 by keeplearnzzz Closed May 26, 2026

Preflight Checklist

  • [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
  • [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

When having long conversations in Claude Code CLI, it becomes difficult to quickly locate my own inputs (prompts) when
scrolling through the terminal history. I need a visual aid to:

  1. Identify where each of my inputs is in the conversation
  2. Preview what I wrote without scrolling to it
  3. Jump directly to a specific input with one click

Proposed Solution

Add an optional conversation navigation bar on the side of the terminal window (similar to VS Code's minimap, but adapted for chat conversations):

┌─ Conversation ───────────────────────────────────────┬──┐
│ │ ▐ │
│ [Assistant response text...] │ ▐ │
│ │ ▌ │ ← hover: "帮我查一下UDS 22服务的..."
│ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ │ ▐ │
│ │ ▐ │
│ > 帮我查一下UDS 22服务的DID定义 │ ▐ │ ← marked input
│ │ ▐ │
│ [Assistant response text...] │ ▐ │
│ │ ▐ │
│ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ │ ▐ │
│ │ ▐ │
│ > 帮我生成一个8D报告 │ ▌ │ ← hover: "帮我生成一个8D报告"
│ │ ▐ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴──┘

The right sidebar would:

┌───────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Feature │ Description │
├───────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Input markers │ Each user input gets a small dash/hash mark (▌) in the sidebar │
├───────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Hover preview │ Mousing over a mark shows a tooltip with the first ~10-15 characters │
├───────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Click to jump │ Clicking a mark scrolls the conversation directly to that input │
├───────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Toggle on/off │ Configurable via settings or a hotkey │
└───────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Why this matters

  • Long debugging sessions with 30+ turns make scrolling painful
  • Current workaround (Page Up/Down, search) is slow and imprecise
  • Terminal mouse support (e.g., iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Kitty) already exists and can handle hover/click events

Alternative Solutions

  1. Keyboard shortcut to jump between inputs (e.g., Ctrl+↑ / Ctrl+↓ to jump to prev/next user input) — lighter-weight,

no UI change needed

  1. Colored/highlighted input prefix (e.g., bold cyan >) to make inputs visually pop when scrolling
  2. Conversation outline view (like doc_fetch outline mode) — a collapsible tree of all inputs

Priority

Medium - Would be very helpful

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_

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