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Terminal rendering enters infinite refresh loop when conversation history is long #1874
Description
Describe the bug
When a session accumulates a large number of messages, the CLI's TUI enters an infinite re-render loop, causing the terminal to flicker/refresh continuously and become unusable. The only recovery is to kill the process.
Affected version
GitHub Copilot CLI 0.0.423.
Steps to reproduce the behavior
- Start copilot in any directory
- Send many messages back and forth until the conversation history is long
- Observe the terminal begins rapidly refreshing/flickering and never stops
Expected behavior
The CLI renders normally regardless of conversation length.
Additional context
Environment:
- Reproducible on: kitty + zsh (Linux), Alacritty + zsh (macOS)
- Trigger: Long conversation with many back-and-forth messages
- Can check configuration on https://github.com/neonid0/.dotfiles
Actual behavior: Terminal enters an infinite refresh/redraw loop and becomes unresponsive.
Workaround: /compact to reduce message history before the loop starts, or Ctrl+C to kill the process.
Activity
ViktorBergman commentedon Mar 6, 2026
Same issue occurs on Windows Terminal too.
ori-nonni commentedon Mar 6, 2026
This is particularly bad with gemini or gpt codex, which have a lot of thinking output, triggering the bug sooner
devm33 commentedon Mar 27, 2026
Hello, we have now shipped a new rendering approach that fixes flickering and flashing. Please update to the latest version and try it out!
ori-nonni commentedon Mar 27, 2026
Here is the release referenced, which sets the alt screen as default: https://github.com/github/copilot-cli/releases/tag/v1.0.12
Also to add to this! I'm currently running 1.0.2. The --alt-screen flag fixes the issue (you can also set this setting in config). It would
have been helpful to know this sooner.