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[FEATURE]: Visual distinction for user messages vs assistant messages in conversation thread #16005
Description
Feature hasn't been suggested before.
- I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before.
Describe the enhancement you want to request
Problem
When scrolling back through a long conversation in the desktop app, it's difficult to quickly identify the back-and-forth between user and assistant messages. Everything visually blends together, making it hard to find where I said something vs where the agent responded.
Suggestion
Add more visual differentiation for user messages (and also question/answer prompts) in the conversation thread. Some options:
- Contrasting background color between user and assistant message blocks
- Colored border on one side of user messages
- Bolder label/avatar treatment for the user vs assistant
Any combination of these would dramatically improve scannability when scrolling through long sessions.
Implementation ideas
The theme system already has tokens like border, borderActive, backgroundPanel, and backgroundElement. New theme tokens could be added for user vs assistant message styling, e.g.:
"messageUserBg": "#3B4252",
"messageUserBorder": "#88C0D0",
"messageAssistantBg": "none",
"messageAssistantBorder": "#4C566A",This would keep it consistent with the existing theme architecture and allow custom themes to control the look.
Context
This is a standard UX pattern in every major chat interface (iMessage, Slack, Discord, ChatGPT, Claude). Even a subtle background or alignment difference makes a huge difference when scanning a long conversation to find the back-and-forth.
Activity
alexyaroshuk commentedon Mar 5, 2026
I'm not sure what you mean, the user messages are currently clearly styled differently from the assistant's (border, background):
GaryReckard commentedon Mar 5, 2026
Hi @alexyaroshuk
I would disagree that those messages are sufficiently visibly distinct. Dark grey on even darker grey is not easy to spot when scrolling through a long thread of messages. in your example, you have very short messages, so the left/right alignment does help in identifying which is a user message. However, more often than not, in my usage, both user messages and ai responses end up being larger walls of text that span left-to-right.
What I'm hoping for here is some way to make the user messages very clearly distinct, easily spottable when quickly scrolling back through a long conversation. I think this would also be useful for question/answers, as that is another human-response that I'm usually looking for when scrolling back.
Can this be achieved with a theme? Is there a way to style the user messages distinct from other messages?