Feature request: stronger visual distinction between user prompts and assistant output
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in description ↑
Activity 0 comments · opened Jul 25, 2026
Summary
In long working sessions, the user's question and Claude's multi-part responses (status lines, tool call notes, final answer) blend together visually in the terminal. It is hard to scan back through scrollback and find where each question was asked.
Proposal
Add a clearly distinguished style for user messages, for example:
- a colored background band for user prompts, or
- a distinct prompt marker / gutter color, or
- a configurable separator style in settings.
Current workaround
Users resort to instructing Claude (via CLAUDE.md) to print ==== separator lines at the start of every response, which wastes tokens and is fragile.
Note
A similar request was filed as #34269 but was closed as stale without resolution. Re-filing since the pain point remains in current versions.
Environment: Claude Code CLI on Windows 11 (Windows Terminal).