[BUG] Left arrow key clears entire conversation with no confirmation and no undo

Open 💬 3 comments Opened Jun 2, 2026 by jyxtn

Summary

In 2.1.160, pressing the left arrow key while in the agents/subagent navigation view cleared the entire active conversation with no confirmation prompt and no undo path. Thousands of tokens of in-progress work were permanently lost.

Repro

  1. Have an active, long-running conversation open (multi-thousand token context).
  2. While focus is in the agents view (not the prompt input box), press the left arrow key — either by navigating there accidentally or by mistyping.
  3. The conversation is cleared immediately. No confirmation dialog. No undo.

Expected: A destructive action like clearing an entire conversation requires confirmation before executing, or provides an undo/restore path (e.g. /resume).

Actual: Conversation cleared immediately and permanently. No way to recover the chat history.

Why this is severe

  • The left arrow is a normal navigation key with no "destructive" semantic in any standard UX pattern.
  • There is no confirmation step — the action is irreversible the moment the key is pressed.
  • Conversation history is the user's working context. Losing it mid-session means losing all reasoning, decisions, and in-progress work that wasn't yet committed to files.
  • /resume does not restore the cleared session.

Related

This appears to be in the same family as #62736 (arrow keys hijacked by subagent navigation feature, not scoped to the subagent view). The regression there is broken cursor movement; the regression here is an accidental destructive action triggered by the same unconditional arrow key capture.

Request

At minimum: require confirmation before any action that clears conversation history.
Better: scope arrow-key navigation to the agents/subagent view only, so it cannot fire when the user is typing or navigating in other contexts.
Best: add an undo path for /clear so accidental clears are recoverable.

Environment

  • claude 2.1.160 (Claude Code)
  • Platform: macOS (Darwin 25.5.0, arm64)
  • Shell: zsh

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