goose Keyboard Shortcuts

Type /exit or /quit, or press Ctrl+C with an empty input line. The slash command is the safer habit, because Ctrl+C only exits when there's nothing else for it to do — see the next answer.

Three different things, depending on what's happening. If you've typed text, it clears the line. If goose is working on a request, it interrupts that request and resets you to the state before it started. Only if the line is empty and nothing is running does it exit the session. That makes it safer than Codex CLI (where one press quits outright) but it also means pressing it once may not do what you expected.

Press Ctrl+J. goose is unusual here: the newline key is a setting, not a fixed binding. You can change it with GOOSE_CLI_NEWLINE_KEY in the config file or as an environment variable. The docs warn you off a few characters when you do — avoid "c", and avoid common terminal keys like "r", "w", and "z", since you'd be shadowing behaviour you probably still want.

Use /mode. goose has four: approve asks before every action, smart_approve asks only for the risky ones, auto acts without asking, and chat disables tools entirely so it will only talk to you. For read-only exploration of a problem, /plan puts it in plan mode and /endplan brings you back — note those are two separate commands here, not one toggle key like Shift+Tab elsewhere.

A saved, reusable version of something you already did. Run /recipe and goose turns the current conversation into a recipe file you can re-run later or share, and `goose recipe` works with them from the shell. It's the closest thing in this class of tool to "save this workflow as a command" — most terminal agents make you re-prompt from scratch.

Block built it and open-sourced it, but goose is now part of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) at the Linux Foundation, so it's vendor-neutral and foundation-governed rather than a single company's tool. The repository moved accordingly — links to the old block/goose location redirect to aaif-goose/goose. The Homebrew formulae still carry the original names (block-goose-cli for the CLI, block-goose for the desktop app).

They're two front ends onto the same agent, and this page covers the CLI only. The keys here apply to the terminal session you get from `goose session`; the desktop app is a normal windowed application and uses its own interface rather than these bindings. On macOS you install them separately — brew install block-goose-cli for the terminal, brew install --cask block-goose for the desktop app.

goose has the smallest keymap of the group — four keyboard shortcuts and everything else through slash commands — so there's much less to memorise, but also no Shift+Tab mode cycling and no leader-key chords. What it has instead is the deepest extension story: /builtin and /extension add capabilities mid-session, /skills loads skills, /recipe saves a workflow for reuse, and `goose schedule` runs one on a timer. See the side-by-side comparison for how the shared keys line up.