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.

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:

Terminal bell notifications

Enable sound alerts when tasks complete:

claude config set --global preferredNotifChannel terminal_bell

For macOS users: Don’t forget to enable notification permissions in System Settings → Notifications → [Your Terminal App].

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)