The shortcuts that matter when twelve agents are working

The premise: your attention is the bottleneck

When you drive one terminal, shortcuts save keystrokes. That's a real but small win, and it's the win every shortcut guide is written about.

When you have a dozen agents running across four repositories, keystrokes are not what you're short of. Most of them are working and need nothing from you. One of them is blocked on a question, and until you find it, it is doing nothing at all. The expensive operation is locating the thing that needs you — and then getting back to whatever you were doing before.

Almost every shortcut below is a navigation shortcut. That's not an accident.

Cmd+U — the one to learn first

Cmd+U jumps to the next terminal awaiting input. It cycles, and it crosses repositories: press it again and you're at the next one, regardless of which project it belongs to.

The awaiting badge tells you that something is waiting. Cmd+U is the part that takes you there without you having to know where "there" is. In practice the loop becomes: press it, answer, press it again, until it has nowhere left to send you. That last state — Cmd+U doing nothing — is the actual signal that you're free.

Its counterpart is Cmd+Ctrl+Backspace: return to the last terminal. It's a toggle and it also crosses repositories, which is what makes the round trip cheap. You get pulled away to answer a prompt three repos over, and one chord puts you back where you were reading.

Cmd+I — say the next thing without interrupting this one

Cmd+I opens the compose panel. Ctrl+Enter sends immediately. Shift+Ctrl+Enter queues instead: the command is handed to the backend and delivered at the next idle window, after the current turn finishes.

That distinction is the whole point. Typing into an agent that's mid-thought steers it — you've injected a new instruction into the middle of its reasoning. Queueing says "next, do this" without touching what's happening now. Esc closes the panel.

Reading long output: blocks, not scrollback

An agent's turn produces a lot of text, and the classic answer — scroll up and squint — scales badly. TUICommander groups output into command blocks, and the block shortcuts are how you move through them:

• Cmd+Shift+↑ / Cmd+Shift+↓ — jump to the previous / next block
• Cmd+Shift+. — fold a block away once you've read it
• Cmd+Shift+B — search inside the current block instead of the whole scrollback
• Cmd+F — the ordinary find, across the terminal or the diff tab

Block-scoped search is the underrated one. "Where did that error appear" has a very different answer when the haystack is one command's output rather than an hour of session history.

For plain movement: Cmd+Home and Cmd+End go to the top and the bottom, Shift+PageUp and Shift+PageDown move a page at a time.

Two different ways to make it bigger

These get confused, and they do genuinely different things.

Cmd+Shift+Enter maximizes the active pane within its split, and restores it on a second press. You use it when you're in a split layout and one side has become the interesting one for a minute.

Cmd+Alt+Enter is focus mode: it hides the sidebar, the tab bar and every side panel, keeping the toolbar and the status bar. You use it when you're done supervising and want to actually read something.

Related and much simpler: Cmd+[ toggles the sidebar on its own, and Cmd+\ / Cmd+Alt+\ split the terminal side-by-side or stacked.

Branches, without the picker dance

Cmd+B is a fuzzy branch switcher — type a few characters, hit Enter.

But the faster one is muscle memory: hold Cmd+Ctrl (Ctrl+Alt on Windows and Linux) and every branch in the sidebar shows a numbered badge. Press the number and you're there. Cmd+Ctrl+1 through Cmd+Ctrl+9 work directly if you already know the position — which, after a day on the same project, you do.

The rest of git is on Cmd+Shift+D for the Git Panel, Cmd+G for its Branches tab, and Cmd+Shift+W for the Worktree Manager.

Three small ones you'll want and won't guess

Cmd+Shift+L refreshes the terminal. When a full-screen TUI has drawn garbage — half a box, a stale glyph, a redraw that lost a race — this repaints it. It's the shortcut people ask for after they've already restarted the session unnecessarily once.

Cmd+Shift+T reopens the tab you just closed. Same contract as a browser, and it matters more here, because a closed tab was somebody's working context.

Cmd+Shift+I opens the MCP servers popup. Toggle an upstream server on or off for the current repository without going near a settings page. Cmd+L clears the terminal, and Cmd+, opens settings when you do want the settings page.

Cmd+P, with a caveat

Cmd+P is the command palette — commands, files and content search in one box. It's the shortcut we reach for most when we don't know the shortcut.

The caveat: the palette is desktop-only. Open TUICommander in a browser or as a PWA — from an iPad, over Tailscale — and it isn't there. We'd rather say that plainly than have you press it on the couch and wonder what broke.

Also worth knowing: Cmd+Shift+A opens the Activity Dashboard, Cmd+Shift+K the prompt library, Cmd+E the file browser, and Cmd+J the task queue.

Make them yours

Every binding above is a default, and defaults are guesses about your hands.

Press Cmd+? and open Keyboard Shortcuts. Click the pencil beside any action to enter recording mode, then press the combination you want; if it's already taken, you get told before you commit to it. Overrides are highlighted with a reset icon so you can revert one at a time, and there's a reset-everything button at the bottom.

If you'd rather work in a file, the same overrides live in keybindings.json in your config directory. Only list what you're changing — everything absent keeps its default, and "key": "" unbinds an action entirely:

[
  { "action": "toggle-git-ops", "key": "Cmd+Shift+Y" },
  { "action": "jump-waiting-terminal", "key": "Cmd+Shift+U" }
]

One macOS detail we're quietly pleased with: F13–F20 are recordable. macOS never forwards those keys to a WebView, so we capture them natively and feed them into the recorder. If you have a keyboard with a row of otherwise useless function keys, they can drive the app.

There's also a global hotkey — an OS-level chord that shows or hides TUICommander from inside any other application. It ships with no default on purpose; pick one at the top of the same tab.

The short version

If you learn three, learn Cmd+U to find the agent that needs you, Cmd+Ctrl+Backspace to get back, and Cmd+I to queue the next instruction without derailing the current one.

They're all the same shortcut, really. They answer "where do I look next" — which, once the machines are doing the typing, is the only question left that's yours.