Running Claude Code in your terminal properly

Starting a session

cd ~/code/your-project     # the repo root, not a subdirectory
claude

The first launch in a directory asks you to accept workspace trust. That gate is what stops a repository you just cloned from running its own hooks and settings against your machine before you have read them, so it is worth reading rather than clicking through.

The shortcuts that matter

The four prefixes

Four characters at the start of the input change what happens when you press Enter. They are the fastest part of the interface and the least discovered.

Multiline input, which is not obvious

Enter submits. Getting a newline without submitting depends on your terminal emulator, which is why this trips up almost everyone once.

The four settings that change how it feels

One: tell me when it is finished

An autonomous run that takes six minutes is six minutes you should spend elsewhere, and without a notification you will either sit and watch it or forget about it entirely. By default, Claude Code sends a desktop notification only in Ghostty, Kitty, and iTerm2. Everywhere else you have to ask.

{
  "preferredNotifChannel": "terminal_bell"
}

{
  "hooks": {
    "Notification": [
      {
        "hooks": [
          { "type": "command", "command": "afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff" }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

The desktop notification travels over SSH to your local machine, so a session on a remote box can still get your attention. iTerm2 needs one extra step: Settings, Profiles, Terminal, check "Notification Center Alerts", then Filter Alerts, then enable "Send escape sequence-generated alerts".

Two: stop the flicker

If the display flickers or the scroll position jumps while Claude is working, switch renderers. Fullscreen rendering draws to the separate screen your terminal reserves for full-screen applications instead of appending to scrollback, which keeps memory usage flat on very long sessions and adds mouse scrolling and selection.

# inside a session, saves the preference
/tui fullscreen

# or per launch
CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 claude

Three: three lines for tmux

Inside tmux, two things break silently: Shift+Enter submits instead of inserting a newline, and desktop notifications and the progress bar never reach the outer terminal.

set -g allow-passthrough on
set -s extended-keys on
set -as terminal-features 'xterm*:extkeys'

Four: match the theme

Run /theme and pick one, or select the auto option, which detects your terminal's light or dark background and follows OS appearance changes. Claude Code does not control your terminal's own colour scheme, so a mismatch here reads as a rendering bug when it is a preference you have not set.

Running more than one

Two sessions in two tabs is fine. Beyond that, two problems appear: you lose track of which tab is doing what, and the agents start colliding in the same working tree. The second one is the expensive one, because two agents editing the same files will overwrite each other and neither will mention it.

claude -w feature-auth
claude -w feature-search    # in another terminal

# with its own tmux session
claude -w feature-auth --tmux

# or start it detached and come back later
claude --bg "port the auth tests to the new fixture"
claude agents

Questions people ask

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