At first glance this looks like a change you’d need to understand the terminal for, and you don’t. You won’t be hunting through settings either – Claude Code does the whole thing, and your part comes down to saying what you want and approving it. The prompts below are ready to copy.

Tell Claude Code where your terminal should open

Start Claude Code in the folder you actually work in – the same one you type cd into every day. Then paste this:

I'd like my terminal to open straight in this folder, the one we're in right now. Check which terminal and which shell I'm using, and set it up for me.

Claude Code can see the path for itself – that’s the folder it was started in. Which program you type commands into, or what a shell even is, matters just as little here: working that out is part of the job you just handed over, not something to prepare beforehand.

The change lands somewhere different on every system – on macOS and Linux in a shell settings file, on Windows in Windows Terminal’s settings, in a field called startingDirectory. None of that is worth memorising; we mention it so it’s clear nothing magical is happening.

Windows Terminal profile settings

It asks before it changes anything

Partway through the job, a question appears on screen: may Claude Code edit your settings file? Say yes – that’s a normal part of the work, not a sign something went wrong. Claude Code asks because settings files are treated more carefully than ordinary working files, and it asks even when it goes ahead with other things without checking.

When it’s finished, close the terminal window and open a new one. The setting applies from the next launch, so nothing changes in the window you’re sitting in – and that’s the one part of this that tends to mislead people.

Permission modes in Claude Code

Several folders in rotation? Ask for shortcuts

A starting folder works as long as there’s one folder. Once you’re circling between three projects, promoting one of them doesn’t buy you much – two times out of three you’re still typing cd.

Shortcuts suit that better: your own short commands, one per project. You don’t have to invent those or type them out either:

I work in several folders in rotation, and I'm giving you their paths below. Make me a short shortcut for each one, so a single word typed in the terminal takes me to the folder I picked. Suggest names for these shortcuts, but don't change anything until I've approved them.

[paste your paths here, one per line]

Once you send that, you’ll get a set of proposed names to look over. If one of them doesn’t suit you, just say how you’d rather have it – the shorter the names, the more often you’ll reach for them.

In practice it looks like this: one folder gets, say, the shortcut work, another one home. From then on you type work in the terminal, press Enter and you’re in your work folder; you type home and you’re in the other one.

One step further: one word instead of two

Since you launch Claude Code once you’re in the folder anyway, both steps fold into a single word. You type ai, press Enter and simply get to work:

Make me a shortcut called `ai`, so that one word typed in the terminal takes me to this folder, the one we're in right now, and launches Claude Code in it straight away.

One thing worth knowing before you get used to it: a shortcut like that always starts Claude Code the same way, which means a fresh conversation. Sometimes you’ll want to launch it differently – claude -c reopens the most recent conversation from that folder, and claude -r gives you a list of earlier ones to pick from. The ai shortcut won’t do that, because it has one fixed instruction built into it.

So we’d suggest setting up both at once: the terminal’s starting folder (or shortcuts to a few directories) and, separately, the one word that launches Claude Code right away. Then work takes you to the folder and leaves the terminal at your disposal, while ai handles the lot in one move – and you pick whichever you need at the time.

The short version

Nothing difficult about it, as you can see – you described what you wanted and Claude Code took care of the rest. Your whole part came down to copying one prompt and approving a change.

It’s worth taking this tip as one example of something much wider. You can ask in exactly the same way for the other small conveniences that quietly cost you a few seconds every single day. Working with AI, the limit is your imagination… and your tokens.