Keyboard Shortcuts & Navigation

Gemini CLI has a rich set of keyboard shortcuts that make terminal interaction fluid. Learning these early saves enormous time across sessions. The terminal UI is purpose-built for rapid AI-assisted coding, and the shortcuts reflect common patterns — clearing context, opening editors, toggling output modes.

Ctrl+L     Clear the screen (keep conversation)
Ctrl+G     Open your $EDITOR for multi-line input
Ctrl+T     Show tool descriptions in output
Alt+M      Toggle markdown rendering on/off
Alt+V      Paste image from clipboard
Ctrl+C     Cancel current generation
Ctrl+D     Exit Gemini CLI

The @ symbol is your file reference operator. Type @filename to pull a file into context, or @directory/ to reference an entire folder. This is how you point Gemini at specific code without copy-pasting. You can reference multiple files in a single prompt: "@src/app.tsx @src/utils.ts refactor the error handling in both files to use a shared pattern."

# Reference a single file
@src/components/Header.tsx fix the alignment bug

# Reference multiple files
@package.json @tsconfig.json why is my build failing?

# Reference a directory
@src/utils/ add JSDoc comments to all exports

The .geminiignore file works like .gitignore — it tells Gemini CLI which files and directories to skip when scanning your project. Place it in your project root. This is critical for large repos where you don't want Gemini indexing node_modules, build artifacts, or large data files. It supports standard glob patterns.

node_modules/
dist/
build/
*.min.js
coverage/
.env
*.sqlite