[xcodevn]

> only ~1/3 of sessions see at least a flicker.

...after many months, for such a visible bug, is such a crazy thing to say.

In case the above comes across as too hostile, to balance this, I would say thank you to the claude code team for such an amazing product!

[embedding-shape]

More than 30% of the times you use Claude Code it "flickers"? That can't be right? I use neovim and codex side by side with tmux, both flicker about 0%, what is Claude Code doing that makes it flicker so much? Seems strange

[chrislloyd]

(It's worth reading the gh comment I linked if you're interested in terminals!)

tl;dr other programs like Neovim and Codex use the "alternate screen buffer" which means they don't use scrollback and reimplement their own scrolling. CC uses scrollback (because that's what most users expect) which it has to clear entirely and redraw everything when it changes (causing tearing/flickering). There's no way to incrementally update scrollback in a terminal.

(I also want to add some more flavor to the 1/3 metric because I don't want it to be mis-interpreted. "30% of the time you use CC it flickers" isn't quite accurate - it's dependent on screen height and what you do. Most people will not see _any_ flickers at all. Some people with short screens (typically VSCode users because by default the terminal opens fairly short) will see flickers. Previously, if something rendered offscreen users would see a flicker for _every subsequent frame_ regardless of wether anything was actually changing. Now they will only see a flicker occasionally when it's _absolutely_ needed. Once or twice vs thousands.

Additionally, the metric really tracks when CC emits a "clear scrollback" operation. If the user is in a terminal that supports DEC 2026 they won't see a flicker even if we emit that clear scrollback command.)

[withinboredom]

There is absolutely a way to incrementally update scrollback in a terminal, 100% flicker-free. Whether it works in every terminal is a different question. But if you can accept that your code will work in pretty much every modern terminal -- this is absolutely doable. I double people are still using xterm and other older terminals for this. And in that case, you can fall back to this more compatible way.