Claude Code v2.1.126: Windows PowerShell Support, Project Purge, and Better Container Auth

Three Claude Code releases landed between April 28 and May 1: v2.1.122, v2.1.123, and v2.1.126. Individually they’re incremental. Together they ship two meaningful quality-of-life improvements for Windows users and a handful of fixes that were quietly irritating people.

Windows: PowerShell 7 as Primary Shell

The biggest platform change in v2.1.126 is that PowerShell 7 (installed via Microsoft Store, MSI, or .NET global tool) is now detected and treated as the primary shell on Windows instead of falling back to Bash by default.

This has been a long-standing rough edge. Windows users who had PowerShell 7 installed would still get Bash behavior, which made things like the -- separator in git diff -- file behave unexpectedly (PowerShell treats that differently). That specific issue is fixed too: bare -- is no longer mis-flagged as a PowerShell stop-parsing token.

There’s also a clipboard security fix specific to Windows: clipboard writes no longer expose content in process command-line arguments, which was previously showing up in EDR and SIEM telemetry. That’s the kind of thing that blocks enterprise deployments.

claude project purge

A new claude project purge [path] command deletes all Claude Code state for a project: transcripts, tasks, file history, and the config entry. Flags available:

• --dry-run — preview what would be deleted
• -y / --yes — skip the confirmation prompt
• -i / --interactive — pick state types to remove individually
• --all — purge everything with no prompts

This fills a gap that users have been working around with manual directory deletion. If you’re switching contexts between projects or cleaning up before archiving a repo, you now have a clean way to do it.

OAuth Login for Containers and WSL2

claude auth login now accepts OAuth codes pasted directly into the terminal when the browser callback can’t reach localhost. That covers WSL2, SSH tunnels, and devcontainers — situations where the standard OAuth redirect to localhost just fails silently.

v2.1.122 also fixed a separate OAuth issue: /resume can now find sessions by PR URL (GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket are all supported). If you started a session from a PR and want to get back to it, you can paste the PR URL rather than hunting through session IDs.

v2.1.123 was a single targeted fix: OAuth authentication was failing with a 401 retry loop when CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_BETAS=1 was set. That environment variable is used by some enterprise setups to disable beta features, and it was inadvertently breaking auth.

Stability and UX Fixes

v2.1.126 includes a large batch of bug fixes that had been affecting real workflows:

Connection stability: “Stream idle timeout” errors after waking a Mac from sleep are fixed. Long thinking pauses in remote sessions were triggering aborts — that’s fixed too. The /remote-control command now retries correctly instead of sticking on “connecting…”

Terminal rendering: Trackpad scrolling was too fast in Cursor and VS Code 1.92–1.104 integrated terminals. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese characters were rendering as garbled text on Windows in no-flicker mode. Both are fixed.

Image handling: Pasting images larger than 2000px was breaking sessions. Images now auto-downscale on paste. Oversized images already in history are removed and the request is retried automatically.

MCP: The /mcp view now correctly shows claude.ai connectors that were being hidden when duplicate manual servers were in a needs-auth state.

Minor: Ctrl+L was clearing the prompt input instead of just forcing a screen redraw. Fixed. API retry countdown was sticking at “0s”. Fixed. The per-file malware-assessment reminder in the read tool was removed.

Security Fix for Managed Deployments

One fix worth calling out: allowManagedDomainsOnly and allowManagedReadPathsOnly were being ignored when a higher-priority managed-settings source lacked a sandbox block. This affected enterprise deployments that rely on those settings to constrain Claude Code’s file and network access. It’s fixed in v2.1.126.

---

Sources: v2.1.122 release, v2.1.123 release, v2.1.126 release