It looks like that the CLI agent hides the terminal cursor and itself draws an inverted character where it’s supposed to be and emulates the whole text entry itself.
While that seems like a good idea at first, it messes with tmux workflows: tmux (or screen for that matter) draws the actual cursor in the active pane, and returning to such a session one is led to believe that it’s cursor’s pane that’s active - one sees a cursor-like object. It happens to me quite often that I start typing, only to realize that I did so in my Vim in another pane.
I feel that this goes against established standards on Unix terminals.
The screenshot has a couple details (folder name, branch name) redacted, I did not want to authorize another folder just to take a shot.
Steps to Reproduce
Run tmux with at least two panes
Run agent in one pane
Switch to another pane
Observe two panes with “cursors”
Expected Behavior
One should only see a cursor in the active pane. CLIs should rely on the actual terminal cursor.
The CLI renders its own text cursor rather than using the terminal’s native cursor, which means tmux can’t hide it when the pane loses focus. You end up with what looks like an active cursor in the wrong pane, exactly as you described.
This is a legitimate UX issue for terminal multiplexer users, and the team is aware of tmux compatibility concerns in the CLI. Unfortunately there’s no workaround on the user side for this specific behavior right now.
We’ll be tracking this post to gauge interest from the community, which helps our product team prioritize accordingly. If others are hitting this in tmux or screen workflows, feel free to chime in.
I think there is a solution: tmux can emit focus in/out events (\e[I for focus gained and \e[O for focus lost), which the CLI could use to hide/show the cursor.
But of course the native cursor would be the best solution. If you decided to use that, it would be a nice addition to be able to select a steady bar cursor (\e[6 q) for Vim insert mode - a lot of us do that in the terminal and in Vim. This is something you can’t reproduce with the fake cursor.
