New line in Claude Code: why Shift+Enter submits your prompt, and the key that always works

TL;DR Ctrl+J inserts a new line in any terminal, with no setup. It is the default binding for the chat:newline action. Shift+Enter is the one that depends on your terminal: it works out of the box in Ghostty, Kitty, iTerm2, WezTerm, Warp, Apple Terminal and Windows Terminal; VS Code, Cursor, Alacritty and Zed need one run of /terminal-setup; and in gnome-terminal and JetBrains IDEs it does not exist and never will.

You are halfway through a long prompt, you want a new line, you press Shift+Enter and Claude Code submits the half you had. You go looking and you find an open GitHub issue, three Reddit threads and a JetBrains YouTrack ticket asking for the feature.

Everyone is fighting the wrong key.

Ctrl+J, and that is the whole fix

Ctrl+J          new line, any terminal, no setup
\ + Enter       same thing, if you would rather type it
Enter           submits the prompt

Ctrl+J is not a workaround. It is the default binding for the chat:newline action, the same way Enter is the default for chat:submit. It works everywhere because it does not depend on the terminal: it is a plain control character, not a combination your emulator has to know how to encode.

Shift+Enter is the opposite. For it to reach Claude Code at all, your terminal has to tell it apart from a plain Enter, and plenty of them do not.

What your terminal does with Shift+Enter

If you run Claude Code inside JetBrains, that last row saves you an afternoon. Your setup is not broken. It cannot be done.

/terminal-setup is only for the middle group

In VS Code, Cursor, Devin Desktop, Alacritty and Zed, /terminal-setup writes the binding into your terminal's own config file. The first run answers with something like:

Installed VSCode terminal Shift+Enter key binding

And if it was already there, it says so and changes nothing:

VSCode terminal Shift+Enter key binding already configured

Two warnings worth the afternoon:

Run it in the real terminal, not inside tmux or screen. It needs to write to the host terminal's configuration, and from inside the multiplexer it never gets there.

In VS Code, Cursor and Devin it also touches two editor settings. It sets terminal.integrated.gpuAcceleration to "off", which happens to be the fix for garbled text in the integrated terminal, and it adjusts terminal.integrated.mouseWheelScrollSensitivity. To get GPU acceleration back, set it to "auto" and reload the window.

Inside tmux there is one more layer

Under tmux, Shift+Enter breaks even when the outer terminal supports it. Add this to ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g allow-passthrough on
set -s extended-keys on
set -as terminal-features 'xterm*:extkeys'

Then apply it with tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf. The two extended-keys lines are what let tmux tell Shift+Enter apart from a bare Enter. The allow-passthrough line is a different fix: it lets notifications and the progress bar reach the outer terminal.

And if you want it the other way round

Some people would rather have Enter insert the line and Shift+Enter send the message. That lives in ~/.claude/keybindings.json, which /keybindings creates or opens for you:

{
  "bindings": [
    {
      "context": "Chat",
      "bindings": {
        "enter": "chat:newline",
        "shift+enter": "chat:submit"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Changes are picked up automatically, no restart. One key to know about: Ctrl+M cannot be rebound, because in a terminal it is literally the same thing as Enter (both send a carriage return).

Reference

Official docs: Configure your terminal for Claude Code

Requirements: verified on Claude Code v2.1.220. Custom themes and some other keybindings-file options need v2.1.118 or later.