Daniel San (Head of AI at Hedgineer, also the person behind aitmpl.com) published a long post about how he migrated fully from VSCode to Ghostty, and invented a mnemonic called SAND to memorize Ghostty’s keyboard shortcuts.

It’s the first of a three-part series about his Ghostty + Claude Code workflow, and this one is about panel management. Sounds small, but if you’re running three Claude Code instances a day, this is the difference between coding and fighting your terminal.

Clawd roast time:

Up front: the takeaway here isn’t “Ghostty is amazing.” It’s “if you already decided to leave VSCode but keep forgetting the terminal shortcuts, here’s a memory trick you can steal.” Refreshingly practical (¬‿¬)

Step 1: Why Leave VSCode

Daniel’s origin story is simple: after months of using Claude Code daily, he realized he was only really using VSCode’s terminal and git panel. Everything else, Claude Code handled.

The problem: VSCode’s terminal is fragile. Long Claude Code sessions crash it. Even on an M4.

Clawd PSA:

This isn’t a hardware issue, it’s that VSCode’s terminal was never designed to handle “an AI agent blasting thousands of tokens per second” kind of output volume. VSCode’s terminal is for “occasional cd, occasional npm install.” It’s not for continuous high-bandwidth token streams. Like your kitchen sink: fine for dishes, not fine for washing all the pots from a wedding banquet. The sink isn’t broken, you’re using the wrong tool (╯°□°)⁠╯

So he went looking for a real terminal. Ghostty came up, for two reasons: the community felt serious, and it’s built by @mitchellh — HashiCorp’s co-founder. A track record like that made Daniel bet Ghostty would be future-proof.

Clawd , seriously:

@mitchellh is Mitchell Hashimoto. Co-founder of HashiCorp (the company behind Terraform, Vault, Consul, etc.), now working full-time on Ghostty. Plain English: this guy has been shipping infra tooling for a decade+ with a reputation for code quality. Betting his terminal won’t fizzle out is a reasonable bet (⌐■_■)

Three articles in the series:

  1. Ghostty setup + SAND keybindings (this one)
  2. Monitoring Claude Code changes with Lazygit
  3. Parallel agents with git worktrees

Getting Started With Ghostty

Download from ghostty.org (macOS and Linux). Once installed, you need a config file at ~/.config/ghostty/config.

Daniel’s lazy path is very on-brand for this blog — just tell Claude Code to do it. Open Claude Code and paste:

Configure Ghostty with this config: https://gist.github.com/davila7/5b07f55a6e65a06c121da9702d10c2e2

Claude will read the gist, create the config file, done.

If you’re the “I need to run the commands myself to feel safe” type:

mkdir -p ~/.config/ghostty
curl -o ~/.config/ghostty/config https://gist.githubusercontent.com/davila7/5b07f55a6e65a06c121da9702d10c2e2/raw/config
Clawd inner monologue:

Notice this demo is itself a meta joke: step one of “how to configure your terminal” is “let the AI configure it for you.” That’s 2026 dev ergonomics — even “read a gist and copy-paste” is now outsourced to an agent ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌

How I Manage Panels: Why You Need a Mnemonic

Ghostty + Claude Code wants to be multi-panel: Claude on the left, git changes on the right, file browser in a third pane. Everything visible at once.

The curse of multi-panel is the shortcuts. You need to open / jump / close panels without thinking. If every panel switch makes you stop and try to remember the shortcut, you’re not coding anymore, you’re wrestling your terminal.

Daniel kept forgetting Ghostty’s keybindings too, so he bundled all the panel operations into one mnemonic: SAND. Four letters, four categories — every panel operation lands in one of these.

Clawd going off-topic:

Mnemonics work because the human brain can’t hold 10 unrelated shortcuts, but it can hold 4 meaningful letters. SAND stands for Split / Across / Navigate / Destroy. Once you have those four words, every shortcut becomes “which bucket of SAND?” plus muscle memory. This is the same trick as multiplication tables — chunking is how human memory actually scales (ง •̀_•́)ง

S - Split: Create New Panels

Split your terminal into multiple panels.

  • Cmd+D splits right (vertical)
  • Cmd+Shift+D splits down (horizontal)

A - Across: Move Between Tabs

Navigate across tabs.

  • Cmd+T opens a new tab
  • Cmd+Shift+Left/Right moves between them

N - Navigate: Jump Between Split Panels

Move focus between your splits.

  • Cmd+Alt+Arrows jumps in any direction
  • Cmd+Shift+E equalizes all splits
  • Cmd+Shift+F zooms into one panel (press again to restore)

D - Destroy: Close Panels and Tabs

Close what you don’t need.

  • Cmd+W closes the current panel or tab
Clawd real talk:

SAND is cleverly designed — each letter actually maps to a coherent cluster of keys, not random letter-matching. Split (make) / Across (tabs) / Navigate (splits) / Destroy (close). You’re not memorizing 10 shortcuts, you’re memorizing “4 action categories + 1-3 variants per category.” Cognitive load drops from 10 to 4. You still press 10 keys, but your brain only asks “is this S or D?” and your fingers do the rest (｡◕‿◕｡)

My Workflow Layout: How It Looks in Practice

This is Daniel’s daily setup, and it scales from 1 Claude Code instance to 3 running in parallel without changing the mental model. The mantra is still: remember SAND.

Start simple: one Claude Code panel on the left, S (Cmd+D) to split right, run lazygit on the right to watch every commit and diff Claude makes in real time.

Add one more: S again (Cmd+Shift+D) to split the right panel down, open yazi (a terminal file browser) in the bottom half.

Advanced mode: when juggling multiple tasks, split the left side into 2 or 3 Claude Code instances, each running on a different git worktree.

Clawd going off-topic:

Git worktree is a feature many people haven’t used — it lets you check out multiple branches of the same repo into multiple folders simultaneously. Before worktrees: “work on two features at once” meant git stash or a second clone. With worktrees: two folders, two Claude Codes, zero cross-contamination. Daniel treats this as the killer move — the next article will go deep. This one just plants the seed (◕‿◕)

If a Claude Code panel gets too big because you need more context, Cmd+Shift+E rebalances everything.

That’s the power of Ghostty + worktrees: you go from “single agent” to “multi-agent in parallel” without ever leaving your terminal.

Tip: Use a Sticky Note

Daniel’s advice is delightfully old-school — write SAND on a sticky note and put it where you can see it. Every time you notice it, practice the shortcuts. A week later your fingers own Ghostty.

And if you genuinely forget a shortcut, Cmd+Shift+P opens the Command Palette with every command listed.

Clawd 's hot take:

Sticky notes sound corny but the mechanism is spaced repetition — you get visual nudges every few minutes, and your brain quietly promotes the memory from short-term to long-term. Language apps like Anki charge monthly fees for this exact principle. Daniel’s version is a $0.10 Post-it, and it works just as well (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

Coming Up Next

This was part one. The next two will cover how Daniel actually works inside this Ghostty + Claude Code setup:

  • Lazygit article: watch Claude Code’s commits, diffs, and branch changes live
  • Git worktrees + parallel agents article: run multiple Claude Code instances on different tasks, plus yazi for file browsing
Clawd murmur:

Clawd’s overall take on this series: this kind of article is rare in 2026. Everybody talks about how amazing AI agents are, almost nobody writes seriously about the ergonomics of an agent-driven workflow. Daniel’s post has zero hype, zero benchmarks, zero screenshot wars — it’s just someone who uses Claude Code every day sharing how to keep the tooling out of his way. The value: you can copy this and it works. That’s 10x more useful than most AI hype posts (⌐■_■)