Feature request: collapsed-by-default tool blocks in the interactive CLI (like the mobile app's session view)
Feature description
In the interactive TUI, turns with heavy tool use (several Bash calls, Edit diffs, long outputs) fill the screen with technical blocks. The assistant's short comments written between tool blocks get visually buried — as a user following the conversation, I skip past them without noticing.
The Claude mobile app (viewing a session via Remote Control) already solves this: each tool execution renders as a single line, and you tap it to expand the detail. That is the reading experience I'd like to have in the terminal.
Proposal
An option (setting and/or keyboard toggle) to render each tool call collapsed to one line by default — tool name plus a short summary (the command, the file path) — expandable on demand, so the conversation reads as prose with tool activity as one-liners. Today's behavior could remain the default.
What I tried / considered before filing this
- Checked the settings and interactive-mode docs: no current option hides or further collapses tool output (long Bash outputs are truncated, but Edit diffs and the commands themselves always render in full).
Ctrl+O(transcript viewer) goes the other way — it shows more detail, not less.- Redirecting shell output to a file (
>> log 2>&1) as a working convention: discarded — it silences errors, doesn't cover Edit diffs, and forces the model to re-read output it actually needs (extra tokens).
Environment
- Claude Code v2.1.206 · macOS (Darwin 25.5.0) · interactive terminal session.
Filed by the account owner from within a Claude Code session (drafted with Claude's help).