On resume, TUI repeatedly repaints terminal scrollback during paginated history refill

[astral303]

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.148.0-alpha.5

What subscription do you have?

Pro 20x

Which model were you using?

n/a, reproducible w/o any model interaction

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

Windows Terminal, Version: 1.24.11911.0

Codex doctor report

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}

What issue are you seeing?

Resuming a sufficiently long paginated thread causes the normal inline TUI to clear and repaint terminal scrollback several times while older history pages load in the background. Each repaint becomes progressively slower as the retained history grows.

In one recording, a long thread produced about eight visible repaint cycles; a shorter thread produced four. The Ctrl+T transcript view is not involved.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Use a saved thread whose history exceeds the initial bounded resume hydration.
2. Use the default terminal_resize_reflow.max_rows = "auto" setting, or another nontrivial terminal scrollback row budget.
3. Exit Codex, so you can start a new Codex process.
4. Resume the thread with codex resume <thread-id> or through the resume picker.
5. Keep the TUI in its normal inline view while older history loads.
6. Bug: Observe repeated clear-and-repaint cycles, with later cycles taking longer.

Thread used for the recording: 019fde95-870b-7c33-86cf-c5c7bbf07c1c

What is the expected behavior?

6. The initial history should appear promptly. While older history loads in the background, the TUI should not repeatedly clear and repaint terminal scrollback. It should perform one final repaint after the background refill finishes.

Additional information

Measurements

With terminal_resize_reflow.max_rows set to its default/Auto value, the detected row budget was 9,001 rows.

The recorded repaint sizes grew through approximately:

• 3,376 rows
• 4,014 rows
• 5,726 rows
• 6,323 rows
• 8,739 rows
• about 9,001 rows

No individual repaint exceeded the configured cap, but the repeated repaints emitted roughly 37,000 terminal rows cumulatively, in addition to the initial display.

The complete conversation was not loaded into terminal scrollback. The delay came from repeatedly repainting the growing retained tail.

Relevant change history

The pagination infrastructure was developed across 8bfa49e, 3b8d22e, and dbcd837.

The repeated repaint regression itself was introduced by 449f099. That change extended older-page loading to normal terminal scrollback and scheduled an immediate resize reflow before checking whether another page needed to be loaded.

For a multi-page background refill, this ordering causes one cumulative terminal repaint per page. The proposed change preserves the earlier pagination behavior and defers that repaint until the refill chain completes.

Root cause

In the non-overlay older-page handler, each successful page currently:

1. prepends its cells to transcript source;
2. renders the source to measure its current row count;
3. schedules an immediate terminal reflow;
4. requests another page when the row budget remains underfilled.

This causes one destructive terminal repaint per loaded page.

Proposed approach

While scrollback remains underfilled and another older-page request can start:

• retain the newly loaded cells;
• defer the terminal reflow;
• continue the bounded page chain.

Schedule one reflow when the row budget is reached, no older page remains, another page cannot be requested, or a later page fails after earlier pages were accumulated.

The Ctrl+T transcript-overlay path remains unchanged.

Regression coverage

I have a generic cross-platform TUI regression test extending the underfilled-scrollback test introduced by 449f099.

It forces two older-page responses and verifies:

• both pages are requested;
• all 120 expected outputs are loaded;
• the transcript overlay remains closed;
• no reflow is pending after the intermediate page;
• one final reflow is pending when the chain completes;
• the original 32-row rendering cap remains enforced.

A focused local patch and regression test are available. Following the repository’s contribution policy, I am opening this issue first and would be happy to submit the patch if invited.

[github-actions]

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• TUI scrollback corruption in Windows Terminal #36995

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[astral303]

This is not a duplicate of #36995. This issue does not reproduce in 0.146.0.

I believe it was introduced in PR #36951, so it should be reproducible with 0.147.0, but I can't test that locally due to schema migrations.