Cursor-agent CLI: mouse scroll in Ghostty snaps back to bottom (Codex does not)

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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor CLI (cursor-agent)

Describe the Bug

In Ghostty, while using cursor-agent, scrolling up with the mouse / trackpad to read earlier output immediately jumps the viewport back to the bottom.

This is not a Ghostty config issue: Codex CLI in the same Ghostty terminal, same profile, does not snap back. Scrolling stays where I left it.

It looks like cursor-agent’s TUI keeps auto-following / redrawing the latest line (alternate screen + mouse tracking + frequent re-renders), so any manual scroll is overwritten on the next frame.

Related threads (same TUI scroll problem, different symptoms):

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open Ghostty on macOS.
  2. Run cursor-agent and produce more than one screen of output (streaming reply or tool output).
  3. Scroll up with the mouse / trackpad to read earlier content.
  4. The view snaps back to the bottom almost immediately.
  5. Repeat in the same Ghostty profile with Codex CLI — the scroll position stays put.

Expected Behavior

Scrolling up should pause auto-follow until I return to the bottom, same as Codex.

Operating System

macOS 26.2 (Build 25C56)

Version Information

  • cursor-agent: 2026.08.11-e8db854
  • Ghostty: 1.3.1 (stable)
  • Ghostty mouse-reporting = true (Cmd+Shift+M toggles it). Codex still scrolls normally with this config.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No — Cursor works, but reviewing long CLI sessions is painful.

8

Thanks for the post! You’re right that this isn’t your Ghostty config, and it’s not specific to Ghostty either. The mechanism is a little different from your guess, in a way that matters for workarounds: the CLI doesn’t use the alternate screen or request mouse tracking on the main chat view, so mouse-reporting isn’t involved. What happens is that the live region at the bottom (streaming text, status, input box) gets rewritten in place many times a second, and once that region grows taller than the window the redraw falls back to a full clear that wipes scrollback. There’s nowhere for your scroll position to survive, so the viewport pins to the bottom.

Two things that help today: scrolling works normally once the agent is idle, and a taller terminal window makes the full-clear path fire much less often during a turn.

This is an issue we’re tracking, and your Ghostty datapoint is a useful one to add. I’ll post here when I have an update.