Ink 8 requires React 19.3 or later, adds scrollable-view props and fixes terminal rendering issues

The React requirement decides what happens first. A command-line tool on a React release older than 19.3 has to move React before it can take Ink 8 ^[1]. Only after that do the new `contentOffsetX` and `contentOffsetY` props on `<Box>` become available. Paired with `overflow="hidden"`, they are how Ink 8 builds a scrollable view ^[5].

Most of the release is repair work. The notes list four breaking changes ^[17] against 33 fixes in the Rendering, `<Static>` and Text sections alone ^[18]. Separate keyboard fixes cover legacy modifiers, modified SS3 keys and Kitty protocol parsing ^[15]. Among the rendering entries: scrollback survives when the viewport is cleared, terminal history survives `clear()` ^[10], and the cursor goes back below the frame on exit ^[14]. Control characters other than tab and newline are now stripped from text content ^[11].

The trade-off is a React migration in exchange for those fixes. In my view, two of the four breaking changes add little to that cost. Percentage strings for `minWidth` and `maxWidth` were never documented, and Yoga resolved them against the wrong ancestor ^[2]. Any layout that breaks was already being sized against the wrong parent. The stream typing change shows up at compile time. TypeScript code that reads `stdout.columns` through `useStdout()` is reading a property the types no longer declare ^[3].

Input handling needs a check in a real terminal. Mouse reports, focus in and out events and cursor position reports used to reach `useInput` with the escape character stripped, as if a user had typed them ^[4]. Ink 8 drops them ^[4]. For a tool that was misreading those sequences as keystrokes, that is a fix. A tool that had come to act on that text, by design or by accident, will stop receiving it in the same terminal sessions where it used to arrive ^[4].

The release also widens where an Ink app can run. Any Node.js stream, `PassThrough` included, can now be passed to `render()`, and raw mode is used only when stdin is a TTY with `setRawMode()` ^[7]. `useBoxMetrics()` and `measureElement()` gain `clientWidth` and `clientHeight`, the space inside an element's borders ^[6]. In `incrementalRendering` mode only the changed part of a line is written, which the notes say reduces output and flicker ^[8]. React DevTools now connects over the native `WebSocket`, and the `ws` dependency is gone ^[9].

Each team sets its own timing. Every entry sits under Breaking, New or Fixes, and the fixes describe rendering, text and keyboard behaviour ^[13]. The notes do not say whether the 7.x line will receive any of them. Until a backport appears, a team that defers the React move this quarter keeps its current scrollback and `<Static>` behaviour into next quarter. A team that schedules the move now gets the fixes and the scroll props on one branch ^[5].