Everyone learns . Almost nobody learns the rest. These are the ones that change the day-to-day.
| Key | What it does | Why you’d want it |
|---|---|---|
| Search your history | ”What did I type last week that worked?” Your own past prompts are the best prompt library you have. | |
| Park the half-written prompt | You’re three sentences into a prompt and need to check something. Park it, go look, come back. calls this “stash”. | |
| Open the prompt in your real editor | Writing a long, careful prompt in a box is miserable. This opens $EDITOR instead. | |
| Toggle the task checklist | Shows what Claude thinks it’s doing. The cheapest way to catch it planning the wrong thing. | |
| Toggle the full transcript | Expands everything Claude collapsed — every command it ran, every file it touched. | |
| Send the running task to the background | A long job doesn’t have to hold your hostage. | |
| Start a new line without sending | The answer to “how do I write a second paragraph without pressing send?” | |
| Toggle thinking for the next turn | Extra reasoning when you want it, without changing any settings. On macOS the same key is labelled Option. |
A few more you’ll meet by accident, so meet them on purpose instead:
- — cycles the (see the permission-modes tip).
- — picker. — fast mode.
- — paste an image straight into the prompt. On Windows and that’s Alt+V.
- — clears the input box. Press it when the prompt is a mess and you want a clean start.
And three characters that are technically not shortcuts but behave like them, shown in Claude Code’s own hint strip:
!starts a ./starts a command.@points at a file path.
Don’t trust a shortcut list — including this one
Bindings change between versions, and most lists online are out of date. Run /keybindings to open your own shortcuts file and see what’s true in the version you’re running. If a key here doesn’t do what it says, that file wins.