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Text reflow on resize
(behavioral — resize the terminal)Text reflow on resize refers to the terminal's behavior when its window is resized: a reflowing terminal rewraps long lines to match the new width, preserving logical line boundaries, whereas a non-reflowing terminal keeps hard wraps at the original width, leaving jagged line endings or truncated content.
Reflow matters most for the scrollback buffer — when you widen a narrow window, a reflowing terminal joins previously-wrapped lines back into their original long form, while a non-reflowing terminal leaves them broken at the old wrap points. This makes selection, copy, and search dramatically better on reflowing terminals for normal shell output and log files.
Reflow is complicated to implement correctly: the terminal must distinguish between soft wraps (inserted by the renderer when a line overflows) and hard wraps (explicit newlines from the application), track logical line boundaries through scrollback eviction, and handle wide characters and combining marks that cross the old wrap boundary. Supported by iTerm2, WezTerm, foot, and Terminal.app. Not supported by xterm, Kitty, Alacritty (by design), or most VTE-based terminals.
There is no escape sequence to query reflow support — behavior can only be observed by resizing the terminal and inspecting the scrollback.
How this is testedunprobed
Manual verification required — no automated probe available.
Manual verification required — no automated probe available.
The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-04-06
Supported by 13 of 14 backends (93%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |