VS Code extension: tool OUT panels truncate narrative text instead of wrapping (re-filing #40901 / #41736 — the stale bot asked me to!)

Hi team! 👋 First off, thank you so much for all the work on the VS Code extension — it's genuinely become my daily driver and I really appreciate how much has landed lately.

I'm re-filing this one because the stale bot asked me to, very politely, on two previous issues 😅 — both #40901 and #41736 were auto-closed with "Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant", and they're now locked so I can't just comment there. It's still relevant! Totally understand these things get buried, no worries at all.

What's happening

Long prose in the tool OUT panels gets truncated at the panel's right edge instead of wrapping, so the tail of the text is just... gone. Not scrolled, not clipped-with-an-affordance — you can't get to it at all without going and finding the raw content somewhere else.

It's most noticeable with AskUserQuestion, where the OUT panel echoes back the answer text, but it's really any tool whose output is narrative rather than code.

Repro

1. In the VS Code extension, trigger any tool whose result is a long single line of prose. Easiest reliable one:

> Ask me a question using AskUserQuestion where one of the options has a ~300 character description.

1. Answer it.
2. Look at the OUT panel.

Expected: the prose soft-wraps to the panel width, the way it would in basically any other chat/log surface.

Actual: it's cut off mid-word at the right edge. Something like:

OUT  Your questions have been answered: "The first constraint here is that the availabl
     I'm not sure what you mean by the second part — is the engine actually capable of

...and that's it. The rest of the sentence isn't reachable.

Why it stings a bit more than a normal cosmetic nit

The thing that's cut off is often my own words being read back to me — so it's not just "the output looks a bit off", it's that I can't verify what got recorded from my own answer. For narrative content specifically, the truncation lands right where the meaning is.

Also (and I say this with love 💛) code blocks arguably want horizontal truncation — wrapping code mid-line is worse. Prose really doesn't. So this might be less "add a wrap toggle" and more "wrap by default when the content isn't code", which I think might even be the smaller change? Very possibly I'm underestimating it though, and I completely defer to y'all on that.

Suggestion, extremely open to other approaches

• Soft-wrap narrative tool output by default in the OUT panel (keep the current behaviour for code / structured output).
• If a blanket default feels too opinionated, even a setting like claude-code.output.wordWrap would be a lifesaver, and I'd happily take that as a stepping stone.

Related

• #40901 — [FEATURE] word wrap support in the command IN/OUT sections of the VS Code extension (closed: stale)
• #41736 — VSCode extension: tool input/output panels need word wrap support (closed: stale)
• #67113 — AskUserQuestion UI: long question/option text is cut off with no word wrap, unreadable (closed; labelled platform:macos / area:tui, so I think that one was the terminal TUI rather than the VS Code extension — apologies if I've misread that and this is a dupe!)
• #68112 — Chat pane minimum width is fixed and cannot be resized (open) — related but distinct; being able to widen the pane would reduce how often you hit this, but wrapping seems like the actual fix, so I'm deliberately keeping this issue scoped to just the wrapping bit rather than bundling them.

Environment

• VS Code extension (native)
• Linux

Thank you again, and sorry for the re-file — just following the bot's instructions! 🙏 Happy to test a fix or provide more detail any time, and genuinely no rush on this one.