Send a keystroke to the shell

Agents: claude, codex, opencode · On: phone, desktop

Keycaps for the keys a phone keyboard does not offer: Tab, Esc, ↑, ↓, ^C, ^L, ⏎ and ^D. Each one types into the tab's terminal.

Why you would use it

A soft keyboard has no Escape and no Ctrl. A command is running and you want to stop it. A prompt is waiting for a key. The last command needs recalling with the up arrow. None of these is a character you can type.

How to use it

Switch to Shell. On a phone, an Android tablet or an iPad, the two-row keypad (#tray-keys) stays visible in the bottom band while Shell mode is selected. Its keycaps read Tab, Esc, ↑, ↓, ^C, ^L, ⏎ and ^D.
Tap a key. It reaches the shell as if typed on a keyboard, in order with the keys around it. A tap does not close the phone's keyboard, so you can type a line, tap Tab to complete it and carry on typing.

What you see

The keypad is hidden in Agent mode and visible in Shell mode on a touch screen. On a wide screen, it follows the focused pane's mode.
A computer driven by a mouse or trackpad has a real keyboard, so it shows no keypad. A laptop with a touch screen counts as a computer.
What the key did shows in the terminal: ^C and a new prompt, the screen cleared by ^L, the previous command after ↑. No toast confirms a key.
If the box has no shell, a toast says why: tmux is not installed, so there is no shell here. Install it with: <command>, or a line beginning shell unavailable:.
The keys are drawn as raised keycaps. Each key's accessible name is its tmux name (C-c, Escape, Up), so a screen reader says C-c for ^C.
The jump-to-latest pill is hidden while the keypad is visible.

Options and settings

Option	Default	What it changes
`VCODE_SHELL_SESSION`	`v-code-shell` (`-prod` in the installed unit)	The tmux session the keys reach

Limits and known gaps

Each button goes to the shell, never to the agent. There is no way to send a raw keystroke to a running agent turn.
The keypad's key list is fixed. There is no way to add a key.
With no tmux the key goes nowhere and the toast says so.