Skip to content

Keyboard

Shortcuts

Everyone learns Esc. These are the rest — all checked against Claude Code itself, not copied off a blog.

The three to learn first

If you remember nothing else.

  • Esc Esc
    Stop Claude mid-action The moment Claude starts doing something you did not intend.
  • Esc thenEsc Esc thenEsc
    Clear the input box Your half-written prompt has turned into a mess and you want a clean line.
  • Shift +Tab Shift +Tab
    Cycle permission mode Starting an exploration (plan) or letting an agreed plan run (accept edits). On older Windows setups without VT mode, this is Meta+M instead.

Writing the prompt

Composing, searching, pasting.

  • Ctrl +J Ctrl +J
    Start a new line without sending Any prompt longer than one sentence.
  • Ctrl +R Ctrl +R
    Search your prompt history "What did I type last week that worked?" Inside the search, Ctrl+S cycles the scope: this session → this project → everywhere.
  • Ctrl +S Ctrl +S
    Park the half-written prompt You are three sentences into a prompt and need to go check something.
  • Ctrl +G Ctrl +G
    Edit the prompt in your real editor Writing anything long or carefully structured.
  • Ctrl +V Alt +V
    Paste an image Anything visual. Annotate the screenshot first and it works even better. Ctrl+V, not Cmd+V — macOS keeps Cmd+V for its own paste. Windows and WSL use Alt+V. On WSL both Ctrl+V and Alt+V work.
  • Option +T Alt +T
    Toggle thinking for the next turn One hard question in the middle of otherwise simple work.
  • Ctrl +_ Ctrl +_
    Undo in the input box You deleted half a prompt by accident.

Seeing what happened

What Claude did and what it plans to do.

  • Ctrl +O Ctrl +O
    Toggle the full transcript You want to know what it actually did, not the summary.
  • Ctrl +T Ctrl +T
    Toggle the task checklist Any multi-step task, before it gets far.

Running the session

Long jobs, models, the terminal.

  • Ctrl +B Ctrl +B
    Send the running job to the background A long build, test run, or search you do not want to sit and watch.
  • Option +P Alt +P
    Switch model Between tasks — rarely a good idea mid-task.
  • Option +O Alt +O
    Toggle fast mode Straightforward work where you would rather have speed than depth.
  • Ctrl +Z Ctrl +Z
    Step out to the shell without quitting You need the terminal for one command and do not want to lose the session. Terminal-level shortcut (Unix SIGTSTP), not a Claude Code binding. Windows has no direct equivalent.

The keys are the same on both systems — only the modifier's name changes (macOS calls Alt Option). Run /keybindings in any session to see exactly what is bound on your machine.

`/powerup` — the built-in tour nobody tells you about

← Tips Workflow & commands

/powerup — the built-in tour nobody tells you about

ships with an interactive tour of its own features. Type /powerup in any and it walks you through the things most people never find. It is the single highest-value five minutes a newcomer can spend.

beginner

ships with a guided tour of itself. Almost nobody runs it.

Type this in any :

/powerup

Claude Code describes it as “Discover Claude Code features through quick interactive lessons” — short, hands-on walkthroughs of the features that don’t announce themselves. It’s the same idea as this hub, built into the tool.

When to reach for it: your first week, and again after a month. The second run lands differently, because by then you’ve hit the problems the lessons solve.

Two more built-ins worth knowing on day one:

  • /help — shows every available command. When you can’t remember whether a thing exists, this is faster than searching.
  • /keybindings — opens your keyboard shortcuts file, which is also the honest list of what every key actually does in your version.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Keyboard shortcuts drift between versions, and half the shortcut lists floating around online are wrong. /keybindings is the version you’re actually running.

Next tip →

Keep CLAUDE.md clean and your project tidy — why Claude hallucinates without project hygiene

When Claude starts making things up, the bug is almost always in your , not the . Stale sections, leftover scratch files, orphaned READMEs — Claude reads everything and the noise leaks into its answers.

Open it → Back to all tips