Permission dialog presents machine-composed commands as unreadable monochrome text

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Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Sep 4, 2026

The bash-approval dialog renders dense compound commands in a small plain-text box: no syntax coloring, no structural line-breaking, no path/verb emphasis — inside VS Code, whose native TextMate/semantic highlighting the extension bypasses on exactly this surface. The result defeats the dialog's purpose: an unreadable consent prompt produces ratification-by-fatigue, not review — the final human safety check fires without any checking happening. The fix is available at composition time: the extension composed the command, so it knows the intent and structure. Render a one-line plain-language summary of what the command does above the raw text, break compound commands at pipes and && (one operation per line), highlight paths and write-verbs, and pass the raw text through the host's existing shell grammar. Summarize-then-show is already how Claude Code's own reports work; the approval dialog is the one surface that forgot the doctrine.

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