Drop into a Shell with ! Bash Mode

Sometimes you just need to run a command yourself: check git status, list a directory, see what a test does right now. You do not have to leave Claude to do it. Start a line with ! and the rest runs as a shell command.

!git status

!npm test

The command runs and its output appears right in the session. The point that makes this powerful: that output becomes part of the conversation, so Claude can see it too. You run the command, and Claude works from what it produced, no copy-paste required.

This is handy when:

• You want to check state before asking. Run !git diff yourself, then say "clean this up and split it into two commits."
• You are steering, not delegating. For a quick one-liner you already know, running it yourself is faster than asking Claude to.
• You want Claude grounded in reality. Run !ls scripts/ or !cat package.json, and now the following request is anchored to the real output instead of an assumption.

A common flow is to gather a bit of context with !, then hand off:

!npm run build

Then, once you see the errors: "fix these build errors." Claude already has the output in front of it.

Bash mode keeps you in one place. You are not alt-tabbing to another terminal and pasting results back. Your commands, Claude's commands, and the whole discussion share a single timeline. That shared history is the real benefit: everything you check by hand also informs what Claude does next, so you and Claude are always looking at the same picture.