Tuning the Experience: Voice, Focus & Fun Commands

Most of this hub is about what Claude Code does. This guide is about how it feels to sit in front of — the commands that change the renderer, let you talk instead of type, pull in a second model for a sanity check, recolor the prompt bar, and yes, play lo-fi while you work. They are easy to dismiss as fluff. Some of them are pure delight. But two of them — fullscreen rendering and the advisor — quietly change how productive a long session is, and most people never turn them on.

A quick honesty note up front: these are gated more than the core commands. Voice needs a Claude.ai account and a microphone. The advisor is experimental and runs only on the Anthropic API. A couple won't appear on Bedrock, Vertex, or Foundry. Where it matters, this guide says so.

Start with the renderer: /tui

The single highest-leverage command here is /tui, because it gates two others. By default Claude Code draws into your terminal's normal scrollback. /tui fullscreen switches to a flicker-free, alt-screen renderer — the same full-takeover approach Vim uses — which keeps memory flat in long conversations and stops the screen from flashing or jumping as output streams. It relaunches into the new renderer with your conversation intact. /tui default reverts; /tui with no argument prints the active renderer.

Reach for fullscreen the moment streaming output makes the screen flash or scroll-jump (common in the VS Code integrated terminal, tmux, and some iTerm2 setups). Switch back to default when you want the conversation to stay in native scrollback for Cmd+F or tmux search. One naming trap: "fullscreen" does not mean maximizing the window — it means taking over the terminal's drawing surface, and it works at any window size. It needs Claude Code v2.1.89+ and is a research preview.

Talk to it: /voice

/voice turns on speech-to-text dictation that transcribes what you say, live, into the prompt input — useful for composing a long instruction hands-free, and it works in the CLI, the VS Code extension, and agent view. It has three modes: /voice hold is push-to-talk (hold Space, the default), /voice tap taps once to start and again to send, and /voice off disables it. Bare /voice toggles dictation while keeping your current mode. The push-to-talk key is voice:pushToTalk in ~/.claude/keybindings.json, so you can rebind it.

The catch is the gating: voice requires a Claude.ai account and local microphone access. It is not available with an Anthropic API key, on Bedrock, Vertex, or Foundry, over SSH, or in Claude Code on the web, and it is disabled for HIPAA-enabled organizations. If /voice isn't doing anything, that gating is almost always why.

Get a second opinion: /advisor

/advisor is the most genuinely useful command in this guide and the least known. It enables an experimental tool that consults a second, typically stronger model at key decision points — before Claude commits to an approach, when it is stuck on a recurring error, and before it declares work done. On a long refactor or a stubborn bug, that second opinion catches wrong turns a single model talks itself into.

Turn it on with /advisor (a picker) or name the model directly: /advisor opus, /advisor sonnet, /advisor fable (on v2.1.170+), or a full model ID like claude-opus-4-8. /advisor off clears it, and your choice saves to advisorModel in user settings. It needs Claude Code v2.1.98+ and the Anthropic API — not Bedrock, Vertex, or Foundry — and the advisor should be at least as capable as your main model (pairing a Sonnet main with an Opus advisor is the classic setup). You cannot force it to fire every turn; Claude decides the timing, though you can nudge it ("consult the advisor before you continue").

Cosmetic and delight

The rest are about making the session yours — or just enjoying it.

/theme changes the color scheme: an auto option that matches your terminal's light/dark background, light and dark variants, colorblind-accessible (daltonized) themes, ANSI themes that reuse your terminal palette, and custom themes from ~/.claude/themes/ or plugins. Inside the picker, Ctrl+T toggles syntax highlighting for code blocks. /color sets just the prompt-bar color from eight names — red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, pink, cyan — with /color default to reset and a bare /color for a random pick. The real use is telling sessions apart at a glance: a red bar for the production repo, green for a scratch checkout. (Under Remote Control, the color even syncs to claude.ai/code.) /keybindings opens your shortcuts file to rebind actions like voice:pushToTalk.

Then the pure-delight tier. /powerup teaches features through quick interactive lessons with animated demos — a genuinely good first-week command. /radio opens Claude FM, a lo-fi stream, in your browser (it prints the URL if there's no browser to open). /stickers starts the flow to order physical Claude Code stickers, and /passes lets eligible accounts share a free week of Claude Code with a friend. None of these change your code — they just make the tool feel like something a person made.