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Comment by lanbin | Hacker News Reader

Open Claude Code?

Better than OpenCode and Codex

I wish.

Claude Code is clearly a pile of vibe-coded garbage. The UI is janky and jumps all over the place, especially during longer sessions. (Which also have a several second delay to render. In a terminal).

Lately, it's been crashing if I hold the Backspace key down for too long.

Being open-source would be the best thing to happen to them. At least they would finally get a pair of human eyes looking at their codebase.

Claude is amazing, but the people at Anthropic make some insane decisions, including trying (and failing, apparently) to keep Claude Code a closed-source application.

As a point of reference, I’m a heavy cc user and I’ve had a few bugs but I’ve never had the terminal glitches like this. I use iterm on macOS sequoia.

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

Scrolling around when claude is "typing" makes it jump to the top

I've had it do it occasionally in all of Ghostty, iTerm2 and Prompt 3 (via SSH, not sure what terminal emulator that uses under the hood)

I thought I was the only one who had this problem - so annoying, and the frequent Ui glitches when it asks you to choose an option .

Wow I thought it was tmux messing up on me, interesting to hear it happens without it too

Not tmux related at all had it happen in all kinds of setups (alacritty/linux, vscode terminal macos)

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.

To be fair, iTerm is likely to be the single most common terminal emulator used by Claude Code developers, so I'd hope that it would work tolerable well there.

Imagine being Anthropic and opening yourself up to the deluge of CC-coded PRs by all of your users.

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

> Claude Code is clearly a pile of vibe-coded garbage. The UI is janky and jumps all over the place, especially during longer sessions. (Which also have a several second delay to render. In a terminal).

Don't you know, they're proud of their text interface that is structured more like a video game. https://spader.zone/engine/

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.

Can confirm (used to work in the games industry). Code reviews and automatic testing of any kind are a rare sight.

In my experience games crash a lot less often than the windows file explorer

I feel like we give what’s some pretty impressive engineering short shrift because it’s just for entertainment

I'd posit that the average game dev is significantly more skilled than the average dev.

This is a pretty interesting article in of itself

I've actually heard a plausible theory about the TUI being janky, that being that they avoid use of the alternate screen feature of ANSI (and onwards) terminals.

The theory states that Anthropic avoids using the alternate screen (which gives consuming applications access to a clear buffer with no shell prompt that they can do what they want with and drop at their leisure) because the alternate screen has no scrollback buffer.

So for example, terminal-based editors -- neovim, emacs, nano -- all use the alternate screen because not fighting for ownership of the screen with the shell is a clear benefit over having scrollback.

The calculus is different when you have an LLM that you have a conversational history with, and while you can't bolt scrollback onto the alternate screen (easily), you can kinda bolt an alternate screen-like behaviour onto a regular terminal screen.

I don't personally use LLMs if I can avoid it, so I don't know how janky this thing is, really, but having had to recently deal with ANSI terminal alternate screen bullshit, I think this explanation's plausible.

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?

Yes, but this does come with differences and tradeoffs. If the terminal isn't managing the scrollback, you don't get scrollbars and you lose any smooth/high resolution scrolling. You also lose fancy terminal features like searching the scrollback, all that needs to be implemented in your application. Depending on the environment it can also wind up being quite unpleasant to use with a trackpad, sometimes skipping around wildly for small movements.

The other part (which IMO is more consequential) is that once the LLM application quits or otherwise drops out of the alternate screen, that conversation is lost forever.

With the usual terminal mode, that history can outlive the Claude application, and considering many people keep their terminals running for days or sometimes even weeks at a time, that means having the convo in your scrollback buffer for a while.

>that conversation is lost forever.

You should be able to find it in ~/.claude

You can also ask Claude to search your history to answer questions about it.

I think they were saying that in "cup" screen mode (CUP: CUrsor Position, activated with smcup termcap), when you exit (rmcup) the text is lost, as well as the history since it was managed by the application, not the terminal.

Their hypothesis was that maybe there was aj intention to have claude code fill the terminal history. And using potentially harzardous cursor manipulation.

In other words, readline vs ncurse.

I don't see python and ipython readline struggling as bad tho...

To clarify: this is the terminal's scrollback buffer vs one managed by the application in the alternate screen.

When I scroll up in nvim, it will keep the editor frame in place (that's the top bar and bottom bar showing things like open buffers, git status, the scratch buffer or whatever it's called), but the file contents will scroll by because nvim at that point has exclusive ownership of the entire screen and can do anything with it, including repainting parts of it in response to motions or a mouse scrolling (if your terminal supports emitting mouse events).

This is in contrast to the `rmcup` "normal" terminal mode where it will scroll back in the terminal's history.

The best analogue I have for that last one is to use tmux with nvim open, and have a tmux visual selection going. You can scroll up and out of nvim, and keep scrolling to whatever was executed before neovim, and when you get out of tmux visual mode it'll snap back down to the bottom of your scrollback buffer, nvim (nominally) taking up the entire pane like nothing happened; but we can probably agree that outside of a few narrow use cases, this isn't a very desirable way to manage scrolling in a terminal.

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.

That conversation should still exist in the Claude Code log files. Just give Claude some context on how to find it, and it will pull whatever you need. I use this to recall particularly effective prompts later on for reuse.

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.

> Lately, it's been crashing if I hold the Backspace key down for too long.

Golden opportunity to re-enact xkcd 1172.

If you want something better than both of those try Crush which is a standalone go binary by the original developer of OpenCode.

Not really. This guy expresses my feelings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxB4M3GlcWQ I also prefer codex over claude. But opencode is best. If you can use a good model. We can via Github Business Subscription.

The only issue I have with opencode is that it takes over the entire terminal, unlike claude code. Otherwise I love OC.

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