Claude Chill: Fix Claude Code's flickering in terminal

Hi! I work on TUI rendering for Claude Code. I know this has been a long-standing frustration — it's taken longer than any of us wanted.

The good news: we shipped our differential renderer to everyone today. We rewrote our rendering system from scratch[1] and only ~1/3 of sessions see at least a flicker. Very, very few sessions see flickers in rapid succession which was so annoying before. Those numbers will keep dropping as people update.

We've also been working upstream to add synchronized output / DEC mode 2026 support to environments where CC runs and have had patches accepted to VSCode's terminal[2] and tmux[3]. Synchronized output totally eliminates flickering. As always, I recommend using Ghostty which has 2026 support and zero flicker.

Happy to answer questions!

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issueco... [2]: https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/pull/5453 [3]: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/pull/4744

I would love to use this but it breaks Ghostty's native scrollback (two-finger scroll), which I want more than I want to solve the flickering. The PTY proxy intercepts the output stream so Ghostty can't access its internal scrollback buffer anymore.

I have not used Claude Code in a couple months. THEY HAVEN’T FIXED THIS YET?

I’m starting to think that the reason why anthropic doesn’t open source Claude code isn’t due to competitive reasons, it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.

Maybe they bought Bun to increase the rate of flickering so that the text looks solid again

It is very 2026, that this exists for the product by a company that goes all in on vibe coding. Kudos for the creative solution.

One feature I'd love is a toggle to lock the input to the bottom of the terminal. It's a big inconvenience to have to scroll up and down between the chat and the input when responding to changes.

The readme.md format and conventions being a tell that this got written by Claude Code itself makes the whole thing Chef's kiss. I love the future.

Related (I think?):

We've rewritten Claude Code's terminal rendering to reduce flickering by 85% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312507 - Dec 2025 (3 comments)

Possibly the greatest contribution to Claude code in months. I am rushing to my terminal to install, test, and update.

Codex is so much more responsive for me no matter how long the session is running. Claude just starts stuttering badly when the session is running for sometime.

THANK YOU! that flickering is giving me a headache. You're doing the lords work!

Anthropic: Please fix this ASAP

I don't know if this is my problem but formatting has been completely broken recently. It feels ... vibe coded. I wish they had not blocked opencode :(

Damn I had assumed it was that simple of a problem just based on how the scrolling messed up, and thought "surely it's not that simple"...

I initially thought this was by David Beazley, the python/rust guy.

I tried this in the cursor terminal and it now flickers periodically but not like crazy.

You are a legend. Thank you.

Excellent, thank you. This had be causing me headaches!

just make the font-size smaller, and smaller, and smaller... until no more flickering.

Frustrating that the best agentic coding tool is such a bloated mess. I'm surprised they don't have a non-JS version ready for release.

Why didn't they just ask Claude to fix it?

amazing, thanks

Did this get written mostly by human hands, or did AI also write this? I would hope something like this was primarily made by humans...

I guess it's not hard to use AI to improve your productivity by 10x when your code is written by 0.1x devs. It's embarrassing an OSS fixed their problem before they did after all that money they raised