Keybindings

Everything you can do without leaving the home row.

Global

Every open key toggles. Pressing a modal's own open key again while it's up closes it — Ctrl+P shuts the provider picker, Ctrl+K the command palette, Ctrl+S the Smart Mode overlay, and so on. The model and provider pickers also cross-hop: Ctrl+P from the model picker jumps to the provider picker, Ctrl+/ does the reverse.

The model picker spans every provider. Ctrl+/ opens one fuzzy list of every model on every backend you're signed into — type son for every Sonnet, gpt for every GPT — and Enter switches provider and model in a single step. A recent section (the models you toggle between) sits up top, and providers you're not signed into appear as dim sign in to … rows that drop straight into login. Ctrl+Tab jumps to your previous model without opening anything. Use Ctrl+P when you want to manage backends (add a custom host, switch accounts) rather than pick a model.

If Ctrl+/ or Ctrl+Tab do nothing, your terminal can't encode them. Ctrl+/ and Ctrl+Tab are among the few chords legacy terminals literally cannot send (on most, Ctrl+Tab is byte-identical to Tab). agentty negotiates the kitty keyboard protocol on startup, so the keys work on terminals that support it — kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm, foot, Konsole, recent xterm/Alacritty, iTerm2 3.5+, and Blink Shell on iOS. On a terminal that can't (notably mosh sessions, some minimal iOS SSH apps), use the always-portable routes instead: type /model (or /swap) in the composer, or open the command palette with Ctrl+K and pick "Switch model" / "Swap to previous model". Both work on every terminal. (Set MAYA_NO_KITTY_KEYBOARD=1 to disable the protocol.)

Esc steps back one level. In a multi-step flow — provider picker → Custom host… → host input → API-key prompt — Esc pops one level at a time (and restores what you typed) rather than collapsing the whole stack. The footer shows Esc back when there's a parent, Esc cancel when there isn't.

Composer

The composer is a full readline-style editor. Keys are grouped below by what they do.

Submit & compose

Cursor motion

Ctrl+← / Ctrl+→ switch to word-motion only when the composer has text; on an empty composer with an idle session they cycle threads instead (same as Alt+←/→).

Editing

Undo coalesces a run of typing into one step (broken on whitespace and on any non-typing edit), so one Ctrl+Z after a paste reaches the pre-paste state. Ctrl+V is intercepted by some terminals (Windows Terminal binds it to its own paste); Alt+V is the fallback that every terminal passes through. Pasting an image over SSH needs one setting — kitty must be allowed to answer clipboard reads, and tmux must pass the request through. See Clipboard & Images.

Kill-to-end is Alt+K, not the readline-standard Ctrl+K — Ctrl+K is reserved app-wide for the command palette. It pairs with Ctrl+U (kill-to-start) the same way Alt+D (delete word forward) pairs with Ctrl+W (delete word back). Ctrl+U also doubles as “expand/collapse the newest retrieved-context card” when the composer is empty and such a card is on screen; with text in the box it always means kill-to-line-start.

History & queue

Queue behavior

Typing while a turn streams queues the message rather than interrupting. There are two ways to work with the queue:

• ↑ on an empty composer pulls every queued message back into the buffer at once (joined by newlines, cursor at the seam) — destructive on the queue, so re-submit to re-queue.
• Alt+↑ / Alt+↓ step through the queue one message at a time to fix a single entry; Enter re-queues the edited message in place. This works even mid-edit, so you don't have to clear the composer first.

The composer placeholder hints press ↑ to edit queued — type to queue another… when relevant.

Review pane (Ctrl+R)

When the agent has edited files, Ctrl+R opens the review pane. Edits are already on disk — the pane is a keep/undo gate.

Esc commits, it does not cancel. Closing keeps every undecided hunk (the edit is already live). The footer says Esc keep all / keep rest / apply so the outcome is never a surprise. To throw away everything, use Ctrl+X (Reject all).

Palette-only actions

Some actions have no dedicated key — reach them from the command palette (Ctrl+K). Notably Rewind to checkpoint opens a diff-preview picker over every checkpointed turn (git repo + idle session); see Checkpoints & rewind. Fork thread branches the current conversation into a fresh thread that carries near-zero context — the parent transcript is read on demand — to escape a full context window; see Forking a Thread. Compaction depth cycles how full the context window gets before agentty auto-compacts in the background (75/90/95%) — see Providers & Models.