User prompt in Agent Panel uses monospace font and blends into the response making it near to impossible to distinguish.

[ankiga-MSFT]

Reproduction steps

It is very difficult to distinguish between the User Prompt and Agent Response and more so if the response contains code in monospace font. There are 2 issues -

• The User Prompt uses Monospace fonts which blends into the conversation looking similar to 'code'
• The experience does not follow 'right' direction alignment for User Prompts. All the elements are totally centered which further creates a blending issue. Probably a chat 'bubble' might be better?

Attached screenshots of Zed Editor and VS Code (for comparison)

Current vs. Expected behavior

Zed Behavior (user prompt in blue arrow) -

VS Code behavior -

Zed version and system specs

Zed 1.1.7
Version: 1.1.7+stable.268.c17f25cd782edffab64b7c4167abfa44f865b125

OS - Windows.

Attach Zed log file

Zed.log

Relevant Zed settings

settings.json

Relevant Keymap

keymap.json

(for AI issues) Model provider details

No response

If you are using WSL on Windows, what flavor of Linux are you using?

None

[yeskunall]

The experience does not follow 'right' direction alignment for User Prompts. All the elements are totally centered which further creates a blending issue. Probably a chat 'bubble' might be better?

This is a fair point to make.

The User Prompt uses Monospace fonts which blends into the conversation looking similar to 'code'

This is fine, too, I guess. But --

-- both are feature requests. These are not bugs. I’m going to convert this, but I’ll bring it up internally. Thanks!

[ankiga-MSFT]

@yeskunall Any updates on this?

[tsekiguchi]

@yeskunall bump we're already able to set the size for the user and the agent responses, so it would be great to be able to set the font that is being used within each of these. And maybe most importantly, as many other people have suggested, it would be incredibly helpful to be able to set the background of the user response to help distinguish it from the agent response.

[feeiyu]

Could we make user prompts sticky at the top, similar to the multi-buffer sticky scrolling behavior?

[rommyarb]

Exactly what I have in mind. Cursor has implemented this.

[zhukovgeorge]

I have the same problem and found an additional theming limitation that makes it more difficult to work around.

For example:

As a result, the interface does not provide a reliable visual distinction between sender role and content type. The user message is styled like code, and when the assistant answers with a code block, both parts of the conversation appear to belong to the same category.

The problem intensifies when you have long conversations. Code blocks need it's own styling and user messages also need an independent visual parameter that remains visible regardless of what the assistant produces. So a separate color parameter should be an easy solution for this problem. Currently "editor.background": controls the color for user messages, code blocks and, IDE editor background.

[lholden]

I have a PR that would allow the font face for the user input to be configured. That might end up helping with this? #59629