I don't think that's likely to explain jankiness. I do know my way around terminal screens and escape codes, and doing flicker-free, curses-like screen updates works equally well on the regular screen as on the alternate screen, on every terminal I've used.

It's also not a hard problem, and updates are not slow to compute. Text editors have been calculating efficient, incremental terminal updates since 1981 (Gosling Emacs), and they had to optimise better for much slower-drawing terminals, with vastly slower computers for the calculation.

Not disagreeing but scrolling works just fine in vim/emacs/etc. Wouldn't it be just managing the scroll back buffer yourself rather than the terminals?

Yesterday, I resumed a former claude code session in order to copy code it had generated earlier in that session. Unfortunately, when resuming, it only prints the last N hundred lines of the session to the terminal, so what I was looking for was cut off.

I think that for this sort of _interactive_ application, there's no avoiding the need to manage scroll/history.

This is a pretty interesting article in of itself

Not to stand up for Claude Code in any way, I don’t like the company or use the product. This is just a related tangent-

one of my favorite software projects, Arcan, is built on the idea that there’s a lot of similarities between Game Engines, Desktop Environments, Web Browsers, and Multimedia Players. https://speakerdeck.com/letoram/arcan?slide=2

They have a really cool TUI setup that is kinda in a real sense made with a small game engine :)

https://arcan-fe.com/2022/04/02/the-day-of-a-new-command-lin...

I mean if you want glitchy garbage that works in the happy path mostly then game engine is the right foundation to build on. Software quality is the last thing game devs are known for. The whole industry is about building clever hacks to get something to look/feel a certain way, not building robust software that's correct to some spec.

See also: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulls (6,647 open PRs)

To offer the opposite anecdotal evidence point -- claude scrolls to the top of the chat history almost capriciously often (more often than not) for me using iterm on tahoe

i will note that they really should of used something like ncurses and kept the animations down, TTYs are NOT meant to do the level of crazy modern TUIs are trying to pull off, there is just too many terminal emulators out there that just don't like the weird control codes being sent around.