Optimize Your Terminal Setup ​

CodeBuddy Code works best when your terminal is properly configured. Follow these guidelines to optimize your experience.

🎨 Themes and Appearance ​

CodeBuddy Code cannot control the theme of your terminal. That's handled by your terminal application. You can match CodeBuddy Code's theme to your terminal any time via the /config command.

For additional customization of the CodeBuddy Code interface itself, you can configure a custom status line to display contextual information like the current model, working directory, or git branch at the bottom of your terminal.

⌨️ Line Breaks ​

You have several options for entering line breaks into CodeBuddy Code:

  • Ctrl+J: Cross-platform shortcut, press Ctrl+J to insert a newline when entering multi-line input
  • Quick escape: Type \ followed by Enter to create a newline
  • Shift+Enter: Automatically configured via the /terminal-setup command (recommended)

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

Supported terminals:

  • macOS: iTerm2, Terminal.app
  • IDE: VSCode, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, CodeBuddy
  • JetBrains: PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PhpStorm, GoLand, Rider, CLion, RubyMine, AppCode, DataGrip
  • Terminal Emulators: Ghostty, WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty, Hyper, Tabby, Warp
  • Windows: Windows Terminal

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 CodeBuddy completes a task with proper notification configuration:

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: CodeBuddy Code may struggle with very long pasted content
  • Use file-based workflows: Write content to a file and ask CodeBuddy to read it
  • Be aware of VS Code limitations: The VS Code terminal is particularly prone to truncating long pastes

⌨️ Vim Mode ​

CodeBuddy 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)