Feature request: focus view (hide tool output) for the default renderer — /focus requires the fullscreen renderer, which takes the mouse and scrollback

Request

Make focus view (or an equivalent "hide tool output" filter) available with "tui": "default", the line-printing renderer. Today /focus refuses unless the fullscreen renderer is active: "Focus view needs the fullscreen renderer. Run /tui fullscreen to switch, or set CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 and restart."

The filtering itself already exists and works well. The blocker is that it is tied to a renderer some of us cannot use.

Why the fullscreen renderer is not an option here

Tried on Claude Code 2.1.282, Ubuntu 24.04, GNOME terminal, with CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 and focus view enabled:

• The mouse is captured. With mouse reporting on, right-click no longer opens the terminal's context menu and drag-select behaves differently. Shift+right-click is a workaround, not a fix, and it has to be remembered on every interaction.
• Terminal scrollback is gone. The session lives in the alternate screen, so the terminal's own scrollbar and find no longer reach the conversation, and it disappears from the window on exit. For long sessions that are read back through, this is a bigger loss than the tool-output noise being solved.

This matches the last unanswered comment on #9340, from users on tmux and Emacs who stay on tui: default and asked whether focus view would be extended to them.

What the filter is wanted for

Reading the conversation — the user's own messages and the assistant's prose — without tool calls, commands, diffs and command output in between. On the default renderer there is currently no setting, flag or keybinding for this.

The workaround in use here is a separate program in a second terminal window that follows the session transcript JSONL and prints only user messages and assistant text. It works, and it keeps the main window untouched, but it depends on the transcript being complete, which it is not: assistant text written mid-turn is frequently absent from the JSONL (#94251, #74260, #65051). A renderer-side filter has no such gap, because it filters what is already being displayed.

Shape of the request, roughly in order of preference

1. /focus works on tui: default, suppressing tool-call and tool-result lines and printing only user messages, assistant text, and optionally a one-line summary per tool call.
2. Failing that, a persistent settings.json option for the same, so it survives across sessions.
3. Failing that, a documented statement that the default renderer will not get it, so users can stop looking and build around it.

Related

• #9340 — closed as shipped by /focus; final comment asks for tui: default support, unanswered.
• #91038, #37569 — open requests in the same area, no replies.
• #39683 — closed as duplicate.

Environment

Claude Code 2.1.282, Ubuntu 24.04, claude-opus-5, interactive CLI, "tui": "default".