## Description In dark mode, when navigating the **Agents list view** in Claude Code terminal, the left-side summary/label text of the highlighted (focused) row becomes invisible — white text on a white (or very light) background. ## Steps to reproduce 1. Open Claude Code terminal in **dark mode**. 2. Switch to **Agents mode** (multi-agent / fleet view). 3. Navigate the agents list — arrow-key through the rows so one row becomes highlighted. 4. Observe the left-side summary line of the highli

Dark mode: agent list highlighted row has unreadable 'white on white' summary text

Status Fixed / completed

Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — bcherny

Activity 3 comments · opened May 27, 2026 · closed Aug 19, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (bcherny, collaborator) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Description

In dark mode, when navigating the Agents list view in Claude Code terminal, the left-side summary/label text of the highlighted (focused) row becomes invisible — white text on a white (or very light) background.

Steps to reproduce

Open Claude Code terminal in dark mode.
Switch to Agents mode (multi-agent / fleet view).
Navigate the agents list — arrow-key through the rows so one row becomes highlighted.
Observe the left-side summary line of the highlighted row.

Expected behavior

The summary text remains legible against the highlight background.

Actual behavior

The summary text is white on a white (or near-white) highlight, making it invisible.

Environment

Platform: macOS (darwin 25.5.0)
Shell: zsh
Mode: Dark mode terminal
Feature: Agents list / FleetView

Notes

This appears to be a foreground colour not being adjusted when the row background switches to the highlight colour in dark mode.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

cesarnorena · 2 months ago

Same bug class, light-mode mirror of this issue.

Repro (FleetView agent list, claude agents):
On a light terminal background, the selected/highlighted row uses a yellow background that has almost no contrast against the surrounding text — effectively invisible, same failure mode as the white-on-white described here but on the opposite theme.

What I found investigating it:

~/.claude/settings.json had "theme": "auto". Auto correctly picked a light-family theme (matches the terminal's actual light background) — this is not a detection bug.
The standalone Light mode and Light mode (colorblind-friendly) themes both reproduce the low-contrast yellow highlight (and a similarly low-contrast diff-row background in /theme's preview pane).
Light mode (ANSI colors only) is the only theme that renders the selected-row highlight with usable contrast, because it defers highlight colors to the terminal's own configured ANSI palette instead of using a fixed hardcoded RGB/hex color.

So the underlying issue seems to be that light / light-colorblind (and presumably the dark variant reported here) use fixed-color tokens for the selected-row highlight that don't have guaranteed contrast against arbitrary terminal backgrounds, while the *-ansi themes sidestep this by using the terminal's palette.

There's currently no "Auto (ANSI colors only)" option, so users who switch terminal appearance (light/dark) can't get this fix automatically — only by manually toggling between light-ansi / dark-ansi via /theme.

Environment: macOS, Claude Code 2.1.212, claude agents (FleetView) view.

bcherny collaborator · 1 month ago

Fixed in 2.1.154 — changelog: "Fixed unreadable highlighted-row text in claude agents when the Claude Code theme doesn't match the terminal background" (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md). Closing — reply to reopen if it still happens on the latest version.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

github-actions[bot] · 4 days ago

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