You paste a thirty line prompt into the Verboo Code terminal, hit Enter at the end of the first sentence, and the CLI sends the half finished text. Enter sends by design. There are four ways to break a line, and each one fits a different prompt size.
Short answer: backslash plus Enter breaks the line in any terminal. Shift+Enter starts working after /terminal-setup. Ctrl+G opens the prompt in your real editor. And /vim turns on modal editing inside the input itself, without leaving the CLI.
How do you break a line in the Verboo Code prompt?
Type a backslash and press Enter. The CLI removes the backslash and inserts the newline in its place. It works in any terminal, with no setup and no need to know which emulator you run.
review this diff\
line by line\
and flag the regression risk\
before running the testsThe input footer shows backslash (\) + return (⏎) for newline until you use the shortcut for the first time. After that the hint shortens to \⏎ for newline, and the flag is saved in the CLI config. The program is teaching you the command you just learned.
Does Shift+Enter work in Verboo Code?
Yes, whenever the key reaches the program with its modifier attached. Shift+Enter and Option+Enter insert a new line instead of sending, and the same goes for the Meta key on keyboards that have one.
The problem is almost never the CLI, it is the terminal. By default, Enter sends the carriage return character alone, with no information about whether Shift was held. Only terminals that speak the extended keyboard protocol (CSI u, the one Kitty introduced) can tell Shift+Enter apart from Enter. Four of them already do: iTerm2, WezTerm, Ghostty and Kitty.
How do you enable Shift+Enter with /terminal-setup?
The command writes the shortcut into the config file of the terminal you use. Run it inside the session:
/terminal-setupIt covers VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Alacritty and Zed. In macOS Terminal.app the command changes its name and installs Option+Enter instead, because that is the combination that terminal delivers. And if the CLI recognizes one of the terminals with native support, the command hides itself from the list, because there is nothing to install.
| Where you run it | What to do for a new line |
|---|---|
| iTerm2, WezTerm, Ghostty, Kitty | Shift+Enter already arrives |
| VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Alacritty, Zed | /terminal-setup installs the shortcut |
| macOS Terminal.app | /terminal-setup enables Option+Enter |
| Any other terminal | backslash plus Enter |
How do you write a long prompt in your own editor?
Ctrl+G opens whatever is in the prompt inside the external editor. Ctrl+X Ctrl+E does the same thing, and it is the readline native shortcut for editing the current command, so it is already in the fingers of anyone who lives in Bash.
The CLI picks the editor in this order: the $VISUAL variable, then $EDITOR, and if neither is set it looks for code, vi and nano on the PATH. On Windows the fallback is Notepad. To always point at your own editor:
export VISUAL="nvim"
verbooA terminal editor takes over the whole screen and hands control back when you close the file. A GUI editor opens in another window and the CLI waits for the file to be closed, which is why it calls code -w and subl --wait instead of the bare binary. The prompt is written to a temp file that is deleted after editing. When you close the editor, the text comes back into the input and sits there. Nothing is sent until you press Enter.
What happens when you paste a huge text?
The paste does not flood the input. Above 800 characters, or with more than two line breaks, the text becomes a short reference shaped like [Pasted text #1 +42 lines]. The number counts breaks, not lines: a 43 line excerpt shows up as 42, because the last line does not end in a break.
When you open the editor with Ctrl+G, the reference expands back into the full content and collapses again when you close the file. You edit the real text, not the label.
How does /vim work in Verboo Code?
The command toggles the input editing mode between Vim and Normal, and the choice is saved in the global CLI config, so it also applies to your next sessions. Once it is on, Escape toggles between INSERT and NORMAL inside the prompt.
/vim
Editor mode set to vim. Use Escape key to toggle between INSERT and NORMAL modes.To turn it off, run /vim again, because it is a toggle. One common mix up: /vim changes how you edit the command line, it does not open an external editor or write a file. The external editor is Ctrl+G. And the command is interactive, so it does not exist in headless runs.
Which of the four paths should you use?
| Situation | Path | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Two or three sentences in the prompt | backslash plus Enter | no setup, no dependency on the terminal |
| A multi line prompt, every day | /terminal-setup | Shift+Enter becomes a single keystroke |
| A prompt with a code block, log or diff | Ctrl+G | a real editor, with search, syntax and undo |
| You already edit in Vim | /vim | same motions, without leaving the session |
A long prompt only delivers as much as the model behind it can handle. In Verboo Code, /model swaps the engine mid session and keeps the context you just wrote, so you can test the same prompt on another model without pasting it again.
