feat: implement terminal style chat history

[PratyushChauhan]

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 UI-only keyboard interaction change scoped to the chat composer; primary risk is minor UX regressions or conflicts with existing menu navigation.

Overview
Adds terminal-style prompt history navigation to the chat composer: ArrowUp cycles through previously sent user messages and ArrowDown moves back toward the live draft, restoring the saved draft when returning to index -1.

Introduces historyIndexRef/savedDraftRef to track history without new state, and resets this history whenever the composer is cleared (thread change, send, plan follow-up submission, or standalone slash command).

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit 7387819. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}

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 7387819.}

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[PratyushChauhan]

Video:

2026-04-06.14-55-36.mp4

[cursor]

ArrowUp unconditionally overrides multi-line cursor navigation

Medium Severity

The ArrowUp/ArrowDown history navigation activates unconditionally whenever user messages exist, with no check for cursor position or whether the prompt is multi-line. Since the composer supports multi-line input via Shift+Enter, pressing ArrowUp in a multi-line draft replaces the entire text with a historical message instead of moving the cursor up within the text. The handler is registered at COMMAND_PRIORITY_HIGH and calls event.preventDefault(), completely blocking normal Lexical cursor movement.

Additional Locations (1)

• apps/web/src/components/ChatView.tsx#L3872-L3882

 

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit a068222. Configure here.}

[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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^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit cd7686d. Configure here.}