Interactive mode
bravebot
The input box grows with what you type, up to ten rows, and then scrolls to the caret rather than growing further. It keeps growing while a turn runs.
Sending and editing
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enter | send |
| Shift-Enter, Ctrl-J | start a new line without sending |
| Ctrl-G | compose in $VISUAL or $EDITOR and take back what you saved |
| Escape | discard a half-typed prompt, or stop a running turn |
| Ctrl-C | stop the nearest thing there is to stop, and leave when there is nothing left |
| Up / Down | walk back through prompts you have sent |
| Tab | complete a slash command or an @path |
Enter on an empty line does nothing. Shift-Enter needs a terminal that reports the modifier (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm) or one configured to send a newline; Ctrl-J is the fallback that always works, in every terminal and in shell mode too.
Ctrl-G does nothing while a turn runs.
Stopping and leaving
Escape only ever stops, and never leaves. Ctrl-C is read against what is happening:
| What is happening | What Ctrl-C does |
|---|---|
| a turn in flight, or a command running | stops it, and the session stays where it was |
| nothing running, a line in the box | takes the line, and offers the way out |
| nothing running, an empty box | ends the session |
Taking the line says so, on the row beneath the box, and names the key that ends the session. That offer lives for exactly one press.
Stopping is silent. A reply still arriving stops arriving, the prompt that was sent comes back to the box for editing, and that is the whole of the answer — there is nothing to wait through. What still finishes is a tool call already running, because stopping one part way could leave a file half written.
The prompt stays in the transcript, marked stopped, rather than coming back to the box, when either the turn had already done something visible or there are prompts waiting behind it. Both mean there is an order to keep.
Sending while a turn runs
Typing, editing, pasting, dropping a file, completing, walking back through earlier prompts and scrolling the transcript all do exactly what they do at rest. The only thing a running turn refuses is sending.
Enter mid-turn takes the line out of the box and holds it. It is drawn under the box, marked, so you can see that what you sent went somewhere. Waiting prompts run in the order you typed them, one turn each, as soon as the session is free. A waiting prompt is not in the transcript — it moves there when its own turn begins.
What a queued prompt names is settled when it is queued, so a file you took off the line afterwards was never part of it.
Stopping a turn leaves the queue alone: the next waiting prompt starts as it would after any turn.
The rows beneath the box
They run in one order, nearest the box first:
- what the line in the box carries — attached files and pictures;
- prompts waiting for the turn in flight;
- what a half-typed line could still become — slash-command or
@pathcompletions.
Markers
A folded paste, a pasted picture and a dropped file each fold to a marker in the line, like
[Pasted text #2 +40 lines] or [Image #1]. A marker behaves as one thing:
- Backspace or Delete takes the whole marker in one press, and deleting it takes the attachment off.
- Left or Right crosses it whole; the caret never rests inside one.
- The caret is drawn over every cell of the marker it is on, including the part that wrapped.
Square brackets you typed yourself are still deleted a character at a time.
See Adding context for what each kind of attachment does.
Slash commands and @path
Typing / offers the commands, and typing @ opens a picker over the workspace with directories
first: a prefix narrows it, a slash descends, Tab completes without disturbing the rest of the
sentence, and version-control and build directories are not offered. Sending a prompt that ends in a
half-typed reference completes it rather than sending the fragment.
See Slash commands and Adding context.
Reading back
Ctrl-O opens the scroller over the transcript, and Ctrl-T toggles the audit trail. See Reading the transcript and The audit trail.
Long turns
A turn may make 40 rounds of tool calls. On the fortieth the next request offers no tools and the planner is told it has none left, so it answers with what it has. This is a bound on futility rather than a safety property: a gate refuses on the thousandth round what it refuses on the first.