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Quick terminal moves

A handful of short moves cover most of a day to day session: resuming a specific session, going back to an earlier checkpoint, running a shell command without leaving the conversation, and asking for deeper reasoning for a single turn without changing the setting for the whole session.

A Claude Code session is steered as much by a handful of short moves as by long instructions. --continue resumes the most recent session in the current folder, --resume opens a picker to choose a specific one, ! at the start of a line switches to shell mode for an inline command, and /rewind opens a checkpoint menu to go back without losing the conversation.

Resuming a specific session

--continue picks up the most recent session open in the current folder and resumes it directly, with nothing to select. --resume opens a session picker, or accepts a specific identifier to jump straight to it. In non interactive mode:

claude -p "summarise what we have done" --continue

This move avoids having to retype the context of a conversation already held the day before, on the same project folder.

Going back to a checkpoint with /rewind

Claude Code keeps the hundred most recent checkpoints of a session, with a new checkpoint created on every message sent. /rewind, or two presses of Escape from an empty input, opens a six choice menu on the selected checkpoint: restore code and conversation, restore the conversation alone, restore the code alone, summarise from that point or up to that point to free up context, or cancel without changing anything. These checkpoints are automatically cleaned up after thirty days.

/rewind does not cover everything: files modified by a bash command such as rm, mv or cp escape this tracking and cannot be undone by this move, a sub-agent's edits are generally not restored either, a change made outside the session is not restored, and a symlinked or hardlinked path is ignored on restore. The lesson on undoing and recovering a change details these limits and the git move that covers them instead.

An inline shell command with !

Typing ! right at the start of the input switches to shell mode: the command that follows runs directly, its output is added to the conversation, and Claude takes it into account for the rest of its reasoning, without going through a request phrased in natural language.

! git status --short

Adjusting reasoning for a single turn

The keyword ultrathink, placed anywhere in a request, adds a one off instruction that asks for deeper reasoning for that specific turn, without changing the effort level set for the rest of the session. Phrases such as think or think hard are no longer recognised as special keywords, they are read as ordinary text. The session's effort level is set separately, with the /effort command.

Remembering a fact without a dedicated prefix

Adding a fact to remember no longer goes through a prefix typed on the keyboard: Claude feeds an automatic memory itself as the session goes along, and /memory opens the memory files to browse or correct them by hand.

To write text in an editor closer to terminal habits, vim mode is enabled from /config, under Editor mode, or by writing "editorMode": "vim" in a settings file. This mode combines with everything else in this list, it does not replace any of the previous moves. These moves sit on top of mechanisms already covered, notably interrupting and redirecting mid task, which distinguishes Escape from a full stop with Ctrl+C.