Cursor CLI appears to retain the full session history instead of keeping a bounded working history window. In long-running sessions, this triggers frequent tmux refreshes/repaints and makes the CLI feel noisy and less responsive.
Claude handles this better by maintaining a limited history length rather than continuously carrying the full history forward.
Requested behavior:
Keep only a bounded amount of active CLI history for rendering/interaction.
Reduce unnecessary tmux refreshes or full-pane repaints caused by large retained history.
Optionally expose a configurable history/window size for advanced users.
Why this matters:
Improves responsiveness in long-running CLI sessions.
Reduces tmux redraw/refresh churn.
Brings Cursor CLI behavior closer to Claude’s more stable history management.
We are tracking some issues around flickering when running on tmux. Wondering if the symptoms are the same on your side? If it’s different, a screen recording would be really useful!
Thanks for the reply! I cannot share my screen recording due to company’s data privacy policy. Here are the steps to reproduce:
Have a long history CLI like 10k lines. When scrolling a tmux window in the visual mode, we can check the history length.
We leave that tmux window for a long time (properly 10 mins - 1 hour) and work with another agent CLI.
We come back to this tmux window, then we observe that the window automatically scrolls from top (oldest) to down (latest). When the history is long, this scrolling top down behavior can last 30 seconds. This behavior can also be triggered by other events, but since they are quite random, I am not sure about the specific pattern.
Concur on the scrollback replay nonsense - cause is many events, returning to a tmux window after a reconnect, changing font size, changing window geometry, sometimes just spontaneously with NONE of the above. Concur also that i hve never seen claude do this.
About Cursor CLI │
│ │
│ CLI Version 2026.05.05-84a231c │
│ Model Composer 2 Fast │
│ OS linux (x64) │
│ Terminal tmux │
│ Shell bash │
│ Last Request ID de9da1a7-ed89-41d8-88df-fc13beb7cf9c
Using this over a slow terminal link is literal pain. it actually makes the tool unusable, and MOSH doesn’t help, because it’s presumably tmux/cursor-agent interaction.
Clarification, even when NOT on a slow terminal link, the only workaround ( know is to begin a new agent session to prevent the scrollback from becoming “too long” - gosh that really is a killer to productivity. let me just start over so I can avoid this flow busting scrolling nonsense
This continues to be problematic, and is massively affecting my multi-agent workflow, causing massive load spikes on my debian 32gb 5600 server (>100) if I happen to keep several agents in tmux windows, not even active, but if I happen to switch to them, or reconnect to my tmux session (as indicated, almost anything will cause it to re-emit thousands of lines of scroll buffer) - it is THIS that brings my server to its knees. I have to then just twiddle my thumbs for the 5-45m of time until the server’s load processes its backlog and becomes interactive again.
Again, to be clear, Claude and codex do not suffer from this. Only cursor.
I now have to actively kill agents when not in use, to avoid cursors scrollback penalizing my workflow.
@gavinc — Sorry, this is still blocking your multi-agent setup.
What you’re describing (scrollback replay on pane switch or reconnect, load spikes, long recovery times) matches a known CLI + tmux issue our team is actively working on.
We’re working on changes so the CLI redraws less history when you switch tmux panes, but that has not shipped to stable yet. Terminal resizes (font/geometry changes, tmux zoom, or similar) can still trigger a heavier redraw when a session has a lot of history — that’s harder to avoid completely for now.
For now, starting a fresh session when history gets long is still the most reliable workaround. Lowering tmux history-limit can also reduce how much gets replayed on attach.
We’ll keep following this thread as we improve how the CLI handles long history in tmux.
