Optimize your terminal setup

Claude Code works best when your terminal is properly configured. Follow these guidelines to optimize your experience.

Themes and appearance

Claude cannot control the theme of your terminal. That's handled by your terminal application. You can match Claude Code's theme to your terminal any time via the /config command.

For additional customization of the Claude Code interface itself, you can configure a custom status line to display contextual information like the current model, working directory, or git branch at the bottom of your terminal.

Line breaks

You have several options for entering linebreaks into Claude Code:

• Quick escape: Type \ followed by Enter to create a newline
• Keyboard shortcut: Set up a keybinding to insert a newline

Set up Shift+Enter (VS Code or iTerm2):

Run /terminal-setup within Claude Code to automatically configure Shift+Enter.

Set up Option+Enter (VS Code, iTerm2 or macOS Terminal.app):

For Mac Terminal.app:

1. Open Settings → Profiles → Keyboard
2. Check "Use Option as Meta Key"

For iTerm2 and VS Code terminal:

1. Open Settings → Profiles → Keys
2. Under General, set Left/Right Option key to "Esc+"

Notification setup

Never miss when Claude completes a task with proper notification configuration:

iTerm 2 system notifications

For iTerm 2 alerts when tasks complete:

1. Open iTerm 2 Preferences
2. Navigate to Profiles → Terminal
3. Enable "Silence bell" and Filter Alerts → "Send escape sequence-generated alerts"
4. Set your preferred notification delay

Note that these notifications are specific to iTerm 2 and not available in the default macOS Terminal.

Custom notification hooks

For advanced notification handling, you can create notification hooks to run your own logic.

Handling large inputs

When working with extensive code or long instructions:

• Avoid direct pasting: Claude Code may struggle with very long pasted content
• Use file-based workflows: Write content to a file and ask Claude to read it
• Be aware of VS Code limitations: The VS Code terminal is particularly prone to truncating long pastes

Vim Mode

Claude Code supports a subset of Vim keybindings that can be enabled with /vim or configured via /config.

The supported subset includes:

• Mode switching: Esc (to NORMAL), i/I, a/A, o/O (to INSERT)
• Navigation: h/j/k/l, w/e/b, 0/$/^, gg/G
• Editing: x, dw/de/db/dd/D, cw/ce/cb/cc/C, . (repeat)