Claude Code Focus View: Keyboard-Driven Session Navigation in NO_FLICKER Mode

New Feature: Focus View in NO_FLICKER Mode

Claude Code v2.1.97 adds a Focus View to its fullscreen rendering mode, toggled with Ctrl+O. When activated, the interface strips away everything except three essential elements: the current prompt, a single-line summary of the active tool call (including diff statistics for file edits), and the final response. For developers running long multi-file sessions, this provides an at-a-glance status check without scrolling through a busy transcript.

Focus View is available exclusively within NO_FLICKER mode — the opt-in alternative renderer introduced in v2.1.89 and enabled via CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1. The fullscreen renderer draws Claude Code on the terminal's alternate screen buffer (similar to vim or htop), eliminating the flickering that the default renderer produces when redrawing large outputs. Focus View is the first major ergonomic addition built specifically for this renderer.

Maturation of NO_FLICKER Mode

v2.1.97 also delivers a substantial batch of quality improvements to NO_FLICKER mode, indicating the renderer is moving toward stability:

• Scroll artifacts in zellij — rendering glitches when Claude Code ran inside zellij are resolved.
• Memory leak on API retries — stale streaming state left over from retried requests no longer accumulates in memory.
• Windows Terminal scroll speed — slow mouse-wheel scrolling on Windows Terminal is fixed.
• Short terminal support — the custom status line now displays correctly on terminals shorter than 24 rows.
• Warp shortcuts — Shift+Enter and Alt/Cmd+arrow key shortcuts now work correctly in Warp with NO_FLICKER mode enabled.
• CJK text copy on Windows — Korean, Japanese, and Unicode text no longer becomes garbled when copied in no-flicker mode on Windows.
• Wrapped URL copy — copying wrapped URLs no longer inserts spurious spaces at line breaks.
• MCP tool result crash — a crash when hovering over MCP tool results in NO_FLICKER mode is resolved.

Together, these fixes make NO_FLICKER mode substantially more reliable for developers on Windows and those using terminal multiplexers like tmux or zellij.

Additional Improvements in v2.1.97

Image Handling

Pasted and attached images are now compressed to the same token budget as images read via the Read tool. This brings consistency to how images consume context, and helps prevent accidental token inflation when working with screenshots or diagrams in a session.

CJK Input for Commands

Slash command and @-mention completion now triggers after CJK sentence punctuation, so Japanese and Chinese users no longer need to insert a space before / or @ to activate the completion popup. This removes a persistent friction point for non-ASCII keyboard workflows.

Reliability Fixes

Several reliability issues received attention: exponential backoff now applies as a minimum floor when a server returns a small Retry-After value on 429 responses (preventing retries from burning through all attempts in ~13 seconds), and rate-limit upgrade options no longer disappear after context compaction.