[FEATURE]

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

On the Claude web and desktop apps, the width of the text is fixed, and is quite narrow. Although some users might prefer this, I personally cannot stand the recent trend of making everything newspaper column width. You simply waste so much screen space (and makes you have to scroll a lot more) and makes reading a lot slower, not to mention how ugly the app looks. It's almost comical to see half the screen totally blank and unused, with the text narrowly bunched up in the center of screen.

This is not an issue on Claude Code obviously since the window panel size on VS Code or terminal is easily customizable, but it is very frustrating for when using the desktop app. It's 2026 -- it'd be nice if users could select their preferred text width so they can read the generated text comfortably.

This is a basic accessibility request in the vein of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/50543, but even easier to implement, presumably. There's likely a significant silent minority who would love such a feature. I'll so greatly appreciate as it'll make such a big difference and make using Claude desktop 100x more enjoyable. Thank you for reading!

Proposed Solution

I'd like to have an option in settings where we can customize the text display width, with at least 3 or 4 options, so each user can choose their preferred text width. Something like, 'narrow', 'standard', 'wider', 'full' would be great. And obviously, it's fine if the text width has to shrink to the current default width when opening up an artifact in chat (eg a .py file) to view side by side, but when it's just in regular chat mode with no artifacts opened, it should use the width set by the user.

In an ideal world -- in the settings of the Claude desktop app, there'd be something like an "appearances" subsection where you can customize things like font size, font (it'd be nice to have more than 4 font options), and of course, text display width.

Alternative Solutions

There are a few extensions on Chrome and Firefox that claim to change text width for the web version of Claude, but they don't have many users and are inherently brittle. It'd be much more robust and trustworthy and effective for this to be built into the product itself.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Other

Use Case Example

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Additional Context

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