Opening and Closing Claude Code

00:00 Let’s start with a quick recap. To open Claude Code, you type claude in your terminal in the folder that you want to open Claude Code in.

00:11 When you open Claude Code for the first time in a folder, you are greeted by a nice message: Do you trust the files in this folder? And you should actually also read this message the other way around.

00:24 Are you trusting Claude Code to deal with the files in this folder? Because Claude Code will read those files, might edit those files, or even delete those files depending on your instructions.

00:36 But it’s not only your instructions that might give Claude Code ideas how to deal with the files. Depending on how much freedom you give to Claude Code, Claude Code also might have the idea of deleting a file, renaming a file, even if you don’t want it.

00:52 So one thing after you say yes and proceed to do is to create a Git repository. We’ll do this in the next lesson. For now, we will focus on the message that you’re seeing here.

01:06 After you say yes, let’s proceed in this folder because before actually going to work with Claude Code, let’s investigate what you are seeing here. On the upper left, you see the Claude Code version for you, and this might be a higher version depending on when you’re watching this video course.

01:24 You are greeted by your Claude AI username, and you see the model and the subscription plan you are on. So for me right now, the model is Sonnet 4.5, and my subscription plan is Claude Max.

01:39 Below that, you see your folder that you’re in right now, and I almost forget this cute little alien that you’re seeing there.

01:48 On the right side, there are some messages which I think change now and then, tips for getting started and recent activity if you already were in this folder, and if you already started Claude Code in this folder and you want to go back to a former conversation.

02:03 The main part is the prompt. So that’s the big line in the middle that currently says Try "fix lint errors". This message, I think, changes also from now and then, so it kind of gives you ideas how to interact with Claude Code.

02:17 We’re currently in an empty directory, so there is not much of linting errors that we can fix, but this is basically the command line, the chat, the basic point of interacting with Claude Code.

02:30 So you will write the commands in this line, and below that you also see other useful information. So currently it only says type question mark for shortcuts.

02:41 So let’s do that. You go with your cursor into this Claude Code prompt and type question mark, and then you see other shortcuts that you can use.

02:51 In the next lessons, we will explore some of those shortcuts. But for now, I want to show you how to quit Claude Code because that way we can wrap up the setting up part and go more into it.

03:05 To quit Claude Code, you have two options. One option is just pressing CTRL+C twice or using a slash command. Since I don’t want to talk about slash commands just yet, let’s use CTRL+C and CTRL+C again,

03:21 and by pressing CTRL+C twice you are back in your terminal and you should see your terminal prompt again. And that’s enough for a setup. Let’s go a bit deeper in the next section of this code conversation.