Mouse support and flicker-free rendering for Claude Code
Claude Code's new opt-in renderer virtualises the viewport, eliminates flicker, adds mouse events, and keeps memory flat in long sessions. For developers running Claude Code in VS Code, tmux, or iTerm2.
Fullscreen rendering reduces data sent to the terminal on each update by only rendering visible messages, making it particularly effective in terminal emulators where rendering throughput is the bottleneck, such as VS Code integrated terminal, tmux, and iTerm2.
Fullscreen rendering provides transcript mode (Ctrl+o) with less-style navigation and search capabilities (/ to search, n/N to jump between matches). Users can also write conversations to scrollback with [ or open in an editor with v, enabling integration with native terminal search tools.
Fullscreen rendering provides a flicker-free rendering mode that uses the terminal's alternate screen buffer (like vim or htop), keeping memory usage flat regardless of conversation length and only rendering visible messages. This solves the problem of screen flashing and scroll position jumping that occurs in terminal emulators with rendering throughput bottlenecks.
Fullscreen rendering keeps memory usage constant in long conversations by only maintaining visible messages in the render tree, rather than accumulating all historical output. This prevents memory bloat that occurs with traditional scrollback-based rendering.
Fullscreen rendering adds mouse support for clicking to expand/collapse tool results, selecting text with click-and-drag, scrolling with mouse wheel, clicking URLs to open them, and positioning cursor in the prompt input box. This enables more intuitive interaction compared to keyboard-only navigation.