illustration for Claude Code Essentials

Course

Claude Code Essentials

The Essential Claude Code Shortcuts

John Lindquist

InstructorJohn Lindquist

Claude Code interactive mode has a few key shortcuts to help you stay productive. Restarting a session, editing like Bash, and rewinding conversations all help you feel more comfortable with each session.

Core shortcuts

Resume instantly
```
claude --continue
```
Reloads the previous session and context after a crash, restart, or closed editor.
Rewind conversation
Double‑tap Escape in an empty input to browse history and restore to an earlier point.

Rewinding resets the chat, not your files—pair it with version control or explicit undo prompts for code changes.
Explicit undo/redo
Ask Claude to revert the last change, then use your shell history to re-run or tweak the prior prompt.
```
Please undo the previous change to <file>.
```
Edit like Bash
Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E start/end of line • Option+F / Option+B word forward/back • Ctrl+W delete previous word • Double‑tap Escape clear input • Ctrl+C twice hard exit

Try it

Prompts:

Please translate this entire file to German.

Undo the change and propose a simpler version.

[00:00] You can close the terminal tab with command-w and it will warn you before terminating the session. But if you ever accidentally close the terminal or close the editor or your computer restarts and you need to continue from your previous session, type clod dash dash continue, hit enter, and then it'll pick up right where you left off. When the input is empty you can now double tap escape, and you can essentially rewind the conversation to one of the previous user commands. So if we rewind to translate to Spanish, hit enter, you'll see that it essentially clears out the previous messages, but be aware it does not undo any of the changes. If you want to undo changes, please translate this entire file to German, and if you're not using git you essentially have to say please undo the previous change.

[00:45] Then let that run and allow that change. Then if you want to redo the change, the input actually keeps track of the history of commands, so pressing up can bring you back to a previous command that you ran. So simply pressing up and down will help you navigate the history. Then within the input it will respect bash navigation shortcuts such as ctrl-e to jump to the end, ctrl-a to jump to the beginning, option-f and option-b to jump forward and back, and then one I use a lot since I dictate is ctrl-w for deleting a word. So I can jump back a word and delete a word with Option-B then Ctrl-W.

[01:19] To completely clear out the input, simply double tap on escape, or fire off a hard exit with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-C again will completely exit out, and then we can clod continue to bring it back.