Claude Code 2.1.97

What changed

Claude Code 2.1.97 (April 8, 2026) adds a focus view for distraction-free sessions, auto-refreshing status line, and CJK input improvements — plus a round of stability and security fixes.

New features

• Focus view toggle (Ctrl+O)

  In NO_FLICKER mode, Ctrl+O switches to focus view — it hides intermediate tool output and shows only your prompts, tool summaries (with edit diffstats), and final responses. Less visual noise, easier to track results.

• Status line refresh interval

  New refreshInterval setting re-runs your status-line command every N seconds so build status or process info stays current without a manual reload.

• Workspace git worktree info

  Status line JSON input now includes workspace.git_worktree, so multi-worktree users can display which worktree they’re in.

• Agent activity indicator

  /agents shows running subagent instances as ”● N running” — quick visibility into what’s live.

• Cedar policy syntax highlighting

  .cedar and .cedarpolicy files now highlight correctly. Helpful if you write AWS Cedar policies as IaC.

Notable fixes

Security and permissions

• --dangerously-skip-permissions no longer silently downgrades to accept-edits after approving writes to protected paths.

Performance and stability

• MCP memory leak fixed: HTTP/SSE reconnections were leaking ~50MB/hour of buffers.
• Rate limit retries now use exponential backoff instead of burning all retries in ~13 seconds.

Session management

• --resume picker no longer opens read-only and no longer resets search on Ctrl+A.

Notes

• CJK input — Korean/Chinese/Japanese users: slash commands and @ mentions now trigger directly after CJK punctuation (。, ，, etc.) without an extra space.
• Image handling — clipboard-pasted and attached images now share the same token budget compression as Read-tool images.