Plan-mode approval screen forces a 1-4 choice before the plan can be scrolled/reviewed

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jul 7, 2026 by canastraliaks

Description

When Claude exits plan mode, the CLI renders the full plan text followed immediately by the "Would you like to proceed?" 1–4 choice prompt. There is no way to scroll back up through the rendered plan to re-read earlier sections before answering — the interactive prompt occupies the bottom of the screen and the plan content above it is effectively locked once it has scrolled past the visible window.

This is compounded (but not caused by) terminal-emulator scrollback limits on the alternate screen buffer (e.g. Ghostty hardcodes scrollback-limit = 0 for the alt screen) — even in terminals with generous scrollback, the plan-approval flow itself gives no built-in affordance to pause, scroll, and review the full plan before being asked to decide.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Ask Claude to do a nontrivial task in plan mode that produces a plan of more than one terminal-height's worth of text.
  2. Let Claude call ExitPlanMode.
  3. On a full-screen terminal window, the plan text plus the "Ready to code? ... 1. Yes, and use auto mode / 2. Yes, manually approve edits / 3. No, refine with Ultraplan / 4. Tell Claude what to change" block fills the visible area.
  4. Try to scroll up to re-read the top of the plan (frontmatter, Context section, earlier bullet points) before choosing an option.

Expected behavior

Some way to review the complete plan before being forced into the 1–4 decision — for example:

  • A distinct "review" state that pauses on the plan with normal scroll support before presenting the choice, or
  • A visible, easily-discoverable shortcut (something more prominent than the existing small-print ctrl+g to edit in <editor> line) to open the full plan in an external, freely-scrollable view before deciding, or
  • Not truncating/pushing the top of the plan out of the visible area at all when the plan fits on disk but not on screen.

Actual behavior

The visible portion of the plan is whatever last happened to be on screen when the prompt rendered. Earlier parts of the plan (which can include the plan's frontmatter and early sections) become unreachable via normal scrolling, and the user is asked to choose from 4 options having only read the tail end of the plan.

Workaround (exists today, but easy to miss)

The ctrl+g to edit in <editor> line at the bottom of the approval prompt opens the saved plan .md file in an external editor, which does allow full scrolling. This works, but it's small, easy to overlook, and doesn't feel like the primary way the flow is meant to be reviewed — the fix request here is about making full-plan review the default, discoverable experience, not just an escape hatch.

Environment

  • Terminal: cmux (renders via Ghostty/libghostty)
  • macOS, full-screen terminal window

View original on GitHub ↗