No way to view truncated content in AskUserQuestion option previews ("N lines hidden")

Status Open
Reported on v2.1.239
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Aug 21, 2026

What happened

When Claude asks a question with option previews (the side-by-side layout, options on the left and a preview panel on the right), long previews are truncated with a footer like:

─── ✂ ─── 12 lines hidden ───

There appears to be no way to see the hidden lines. Arrow keys move the selection between options rather than scrolling the preview, and I could not find any other key that reaches the panel.

Why it matters

The preview exists so you can compare concrete artifacts before choosing — mockups, table layouts, code snippets. When the content is tall enough to be worth previewing, it is exactly the content most likely to be truncated. In my case the previews were candidate table layouts, and the hidden portion was the part that distinguished the options from each other.

The workarounds are unsatisfying: widen the terminal until it fits, or ask Claude to paste the full option text into the conversation, which defeats the purpose of the preview.

What I looked for first

  • CHANGELOG.md — no entries about preview scrolling, option previews, or truncated preview content.
  • Interactive mode docs — the only documented scroll bindings are Up/Down inside the /btw overlay and the transcript viewer (Ctrl+O). Neither applies here.
  • No user keybindings configured; defaults only.

Requested

Some way to view truncated preview content. Any of these would solve it:

  1. A key that scrolls the preview panel while the option list keeps focus (a modifier + arrows, or PgUp/PgDn).
  2. A key to expand the preview to full height or fullscreen for the selected option.
  3. Failing an interactive control, make the truncation smarter — for example keep the head and tail and elide the middle, so the distinguishing parts of an option stay visible.

Environment

  • Claude Code 2.1.239
  • macOS 15 (Darwin 25.5.0)
  • iTerm2, tmux

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