Scrollback in iTerm2 doesn't work unless "Save lines to scrollback when an app status bar is present" is enabled
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Aug 20, 2025 by joliss Closed Sep 8, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (aibrahim-oai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
It appears that iTerm2's default behavior causes it to swallow any lines of the conversation that scroll past the top of the terminal.
Enabling "Save lines to scrollback when an app status bar is present" in the profile settings in iTerm2 fixes this behavior.
<img width="955" height="624" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fdfdb40f-dbb0-43ef-87a5-0cae755f947f" />
I'm guessing that iTerm2 treats Codex's input bar as a "status bar" in this context.
I'm not sure if there's much that Codex CLI can do about fixing this, so feel free to close this -- I'm posting this also in case other people run into this.
3 Comments
I have the same issue with zellij and different terminals, and I couldn't find a way to avoid this problem
Is this still the case?
@joliss I believe that option is enabled by default in iTerm, and while i'm not entirely sure how iterm detects an "app status bar", it's at least plausible to me that this is functioning as intended in iTerm.