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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.

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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

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

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

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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+“

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Notification setup

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

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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].

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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.

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Custom notification hooks

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

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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

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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)