Fix truncation of plans in the approval dialog

[Jefftree]

What happened?

When exiting plan mode, the plan approval dialog only shows up to 15 lines of the plan content. Any lines beyond that are hidden with a "... X lines hidden" message. For example, a 20-line plan only shows 15 lines, cutting off the last 5.

What did you expect to happen?

The full plan content should be visible (or at least use more of the available terminal height). It seems like a pretty common workflow to read the entire plan, especially with a lot of terminal real estate.

In packages/cli/src/ui/components/AskUserDialog.tsx#L792-L795, the question height for choice dialogs is hard-capped at 15 lines. Not sure if it's better to modify that (since is affects all dialogs) or something specific for plan mode.

Client information

Client Information

Run gemini to enter the interactive CLI, then run the /about command.

> /about
# paste output here

Login information

No response

Anything else we need to know?

No response

[ishansurdi]

The root cause is in packages/cli/src/ui/components/AskUserDialog.tsx at line 793:

const questionHeight =
  listHeight && !isAlternateBuffer
    ? Math.min(15, Math.max(1, listHeight - DIALOG_PADDING))
    : undefined;

The Math.min(15, ...) hard-caps the question area to 15 lines regardless of terminal height. This questionHeight is passed as maxHeight to MaxSizedBox, which truncates anything beyond that and shows the "... X lines hidden ..." message.

The plan content flows through here because ExitPlanModeDialog passes the full plan text as question.question into AskUserDialog (line 233 of ExitPlanModeDialog.tsx), so it hits the same 15-line cap that all choice dialogs use.

The cap likely exists to prevent long questions from consuming all vertical space and hiding the selection options below. It's reasonable for short prompts with many choices, but plan review is a read-heavy interaction where seeing the full content matters.

Two possible approaches:

1. Add a maxQuestionHeight prop to AskUserDialog — lets ExitPlanModeDialog pass a higher value (e.g., availableHeight - overhead) while other dialogs keep the default 15. This is the safest approach since it doesn't change existing behavior.

2. Use a proportional split — replace Math.min(15, ...) with something like Math.floor(listHeight * 0.7), so the question area scales with terminal height. Simpler, but affects all dialogs globally.

I'd lean toward option 1 since it's scoped to just plan mode and avoids unintended side effects on other dialogs. Happy to work on a PR if this approach sounds good.

[sriram369]

/assign

[gemini-cli]

👋 @sriram369, thanks for your interest in this issue! We're reserving self-assignment for issues that have been marked with the help wanted label. Feel free to check out our list of issues that need attention.

[jerop]

There are two solutions:

• use ctrl+o to view full plan
• switch to alternate buffer mode where you can see full plan

We need to document this in https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/main/docs/cli/plan-mode.md