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ask_user form: pressing Esc silently discards the entire form instead of clearing current input

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#4,943 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
65/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
cli, shell
Domain
cli, developer-experience

Research direction

Look for the form handling code in the CLI, likely in a module for the ask_user tool or interactive prompts. Find where Esc key is captured and the current behavior that cancels the form. Compare with the normal prompt input clearing logic. Test by running the CLI and triggering a form to understand the flow. The fix should change the Esc handler to clear the current field instead of closing the form, and ensure a distinct action (like a different key combination) is used for form cancellation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area:input-keyboard area:tools

Describe the bug
When answering an agent-presented form (via the ask_user/elicitation tool), pressing Esc closes/cancels the whole form. Everywhere else in the CLI, Esc clears the current text input (per /help: "esc esc - clear input, interrupt, stop agents, or rewind"). This inconsistency makes it very easy to accidentally lose an entire in-progress form response when the user's intent was just to clear/edit the current field.

Expected behavior
Esc inside a form field should clear that field's current text (consistent with normal prompt behavior), not close/cancel the form. A separate, distinct key/action should be used to actually cancel the form.

Additional context
This came up in a real session: the user had already answered one question in a multi-field form, hit Esc intending to clear/edit text, and the entire form closed with no indication of what (if anything) was preserved. The agent had no way to tell whether the cancellation was intentional or not.

Dominant language
Shell
Stars
11.2k
Forks
1.9k
Avg merge
14h 16m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

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