Claude Code Scroll

A properly scrollable transcript viewer for Claude Code sessions.

Claude Code's own terminal UI and VS Code panel have long-standing, widely reported scrolling problems: the alternate-screen renderer wipes native terminal scrollback, the mouse wheel gets captured as arrow-key/history navigation, and auto-scroll yanks you back to the bottom while you're trying to read something above. See: #28077, #34845, #37387, #42002, #42670, #51393, #66833, #68732.

This extension doesn't try to patch Claude Code's own rendering (a third-party extension can't reach into another extension's webview or a terminal's alternate-screen buffer). Instead it reads the same session transcript Claude Code already writes to ~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl and renders it in its own panel, with scrolling that just works:

• Live-updating transcript in the sidebar, matched to your current workspace folder.
• Auto-scroll that isn't aggressive — it only follows new messages if you were already at the bottom; scroll up to read history and it stays put.
• Filter box to jump to a part of a long session.
• Collapsed tool calls/results by default so a long session doesn't turn into a wall of JSON.
• One command, "Claude Code Scroll: Fix Terminal Scrollback", that sets CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ALTERNATE_SCREEN=1 for VS Code's integrated terminal, addressing the CLI-side scrollback bug too.

Install

Search "Claude Code Scroll" in the Extensions view, or grab it from the VS Code Marketplace / Open VSX Registry (Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium).

How it works

Claude Code writes one append-only JSONL file per session under ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-workspace-path>/<session-id>.jsonl. This extension finds the most recently modified session file for your current workspace, parses the user/assistant message entries, and watches the file for changes — no connection to Claude Code itself, so it works whether you're driving Claude Code from the CLI, the VS Code panel, or another editor entirely.

License

MIT