Claude Code is the most demanding terminal application most developers run today, and it is not close. It draws a pinned input box, a scrolling transcript above it, animated status lines, clickable buttons, and a little pixel-art robot, all inside an SSH session to a machine that may be on the other side of the planet. It expects the terminal to report every mouse click and wheel tick, to handle bracketed paste, to render 24-bit color, and to keep up with a screen that redraws several times a second while a model is thinking.
Here is a 36-second session of Claude Code running on an EC2 host, connected from AbsoluteTelnet/SSH on Windows. Nothing in it is staged. It is what the terminal does every day now.
What follows is a walk through that clip, pointing at the things a terminal has to get right for it to look this way.
The robot
Claude Code’s logo is a robot face built entirely from Unicode block characters, half blocks and quadrants stacked into a 12-column pixel grid, painted in Anthropic’s terracotta. It is the first thing on the screen and the first place a terminal shows its hand. If the block glyphs come from a font, each one sits inside its own advance width and the robot picks up hairline seams between cells and a slightly different color at every antialiased edge. AbsoluteTelnet draws the block range itself from geometry, so the shapes butt against each other with no gaps, and the fill is the exact 24-bit color the application sent.
Click the robot and it reacts. It squashes flat for a moment, sprouts a pair of tildes, then a pair of dots, and springs back. That is a mouse event traveling from a Windows click, through the terminal’s SGR mouse encoder, over the SSH channel, into the application. Claude Code captures the mouse in its full-screen mode, so press and release both have to arrive with the right button number and cell coordinates or nothing happens at all. The tooltip that appears while the pointer is over the window, “Remote controls the mouse, hold Shift for local control,” is the terminal telling you where your clicks are going and how to get them back for a local text selection.
Pasting an image into a remote session
About seven seconds in, the question “What is this an image of?” gets an image attached to it with a plain paste (Shift-Ctrl-V or Shift-Ins). That should not be possible. Claude Code reads the clipboard by shelling out on the machine it runs on, and the machine it runs on is a Linux host in a data center with no idea what is on your Windows clipboard.
AbsoluteTelnet bridges it. When you paste with an image on the clipboard, the terminal encodes it as PNG, opens an SFTP channel on the same SSH connection you are already using, writes the file into the remote working directory (which it learns from the shell’s OSC 7 cursor-position reports, falling back to /tmp), and then pastes the remote file path into the session as a bracketed paste. Claude Code sees a pasted path to an image file, attaches it, and shows the [Image #1] chip. The small toast that reads “Image sent via SFTP” is the only sign anything unusual happened. The same bridge handles files dragged from Explorer.
In the clip, Claude looks at the image and correctly identifies it as Javanese script. Its answer includes bold, italics, and the Javanese characters themselves, inline in the running text. Those are stacked complex-script clusters, and they render in the right place without disturbing the lines around them.
The thinking line
While the model works, the status line reads “Deliberating…” with a spinner in front of it. The spinner is not a rotating slash. It cycles through the dingbat stars, a middle dot, then ✢ ✳ ✶ ✻ ✽ and back down, a different glyph roughly every quarter second. Each of those is a real Unicode character the font has to have, at the same advance width as everything else, or the line would jitter as it animates.
The word itself is animated too. Claude Code sweeps a highlight along “Deliberating” by resending it several times a second with each character stepped through a ramp of shades, a subtle strobe that reads as a shimmer. That is dozens of 24-bit color changes per line per frame, and the terminal has to apply every one of them exactly rather than snapping to the nearest palette entry, or the effect turns into flicker.
The transcript scrolls, the terminal does not
Claude Code’s full-screen mode draws on the alternate screen buffer with the input box pinned to the bottom, and it manages the transcript itself. As the answer grows past the visible area, the text scrolls upward inside the application while the input box and the status bar stay put. The terminal’s own scrollback is not involved and must not interfere, which sounds simple until you remember that most terminals implement the alternate screen as a swap of the visible region and can leak lines from the main buffer above it.
Wheel up and the transcript scrolls back through the answer. Because the mouse belongs to the application, the wheel is reported to Claude Code as button events rather than moving the terminal’s scrollbar. As soon as you are no longer at the bottom, a “Jump to bottom (ctrl+End) ↓” button appears in the transcript. Click it and the view snaps back to the end. That is one more click that has to arrive as a matched press and release on the correct cell.
What this needs on your end
Claude Code’s full-screen renderer is opt-in. Run /tui fullscreen once inside Claude Code, or set CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 in the remote environment. It requires Claude Code 2.1.89 or later. The classic renderer still works fine in AbsoluteTelnet, it just relies on the terminal’s scrollback instead of drawing its own.
If you want to select text with the mouse while Claude Code has it captured, hold Shift. Everything about the session in the clip, the font, the size, the terminal type, is the default. The image paste bridge is on by default for SSH connections and needs nothing configured on the server beyond SFTP being enabled, which it is on any stock OpenSSH.
AbsoluteTelnet/SSH 14.16 is available now. Download it here. Existing customers with a current maintenance subscription get it as a free update.