feat: implement terminal style chat history

[PratyushChauhan]

closes #1777

What Changed

Pressing ↑/↓ in the composer input navigates through previously sent user messages, shell-style. The live draft is saved when you first press ↑ and restored when you ↓ back past the most recent message. History index resets on send.

Why

Retyping or slightly tweaking a previous prompt is a common workflow. Every terminal does this — it's muscle memory. The composer already had the full message history available; this just wires ↑/↓ into onComposerCommandKey (where Enter/Tab/menu-navigation already live) using two refs. No new files, no new state, no re-renders.

UI Changes

No visual changes — interaction only. Navigation only activates when no autocomplete menu is open, so @-mention and /-command menus are unaffected.

Checklist

• This PR is small and focused
• I explained what changed and why
• I included before/after screenshots for any UI changes
• I included a video for animation/interaction changes

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Note

Low Risk
Low risk, localized to composer key handling in ChatView.tsx; main risk is unintended interaction with existing keyboard shortcuts/autocomplete or draft state edge cases.

Overview
Adds terminal-style message history navigation to the chat composer: ArrowUp cycles through previously sent user messages (most recent first) and ArrowDown returns back toward the current draft.

The current draft is saved on first entry into history mode and restored when returning to the live draft; history state is reset/cleared on thread changes and after send flows (normal send, plan follow-up submit, and standalone slash commands).

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit baf11f2. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}

Note

[!NOTE]

Add terminal-style chat history navigation to the composer

• Pressing ArrowUp in the composer cycles through prior user messages in the active thread (most recent first); ArrowDown navigates back toward the live draft.
• On first entry into history mode, the current draft is saved to savedDraftRef and restored when navigating back to index -1.
• After each send (including plan follow-up and slash command flows), the history pointer resets to -1 and the saved draft is cleared.
• Changes are contained in ChatView.tsx.

^{Macroscope summarized baf11f2.}

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[PratyushChauhan]

Video:

2026-04-06.14-55-36.mp4

[macroscopeapp]

Approvability

Verdict: Needs human review

This PR adds a new user-facing feature (terminal-style history navigation) that changes keyboard handling behavior. Additionally, an unresolved review comment identifies a bug where the implementation breaks normal cursor navigation in multi-line prompts. Human review recommended to address the identified issue before merging.

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[cursor]

Cursor Bugbot has reviewed your changes and found 1 potential issue.

There are 2 total unresolved issues (including 1 from previous review).

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