Escape twice to clear the composer

Agents: claude, codex, opencode · On: desktop

Press Escape twice in a row, with nothing else for the key to do, and the composer empties. Attachments stay where they are.

Why you would use it

You have half a message written, changed your mind, and the box is four lines deep. Selecting all of it and deleting it is three keys and a chord; two Escapes is the same press twice.

How to use it

Put the caret in the box (#draft) and type.
Press Escape. If it has something else to do it does that instead — closes the slash menu or a sheet, or stops the running turn — and that press is spent.
Press Escape again, within 700ms of one that did nothing else. The box empties.

What you see

The text goes and the box comes back to one line. With nothing attached the send button dims, the way it does after a send; with a file on the strip it stays lit, because an attachment on its own is a message.
Any attachments stay on the strip above the box: they are not the text you typed, and the press that took the words is not the one that drops a file.
A dictation writing into the box ends and keeps nothing — the box it was writing into is empty.
Nothing is said about it. There is no toast and no undo: the words do not come back, the same as after a send.

Options and settings

Option	Default	What it changes
pair window	700 ms	longer than this between the two presses and they are two separate Escapes

ESCAPE_CLEAR_GAP_MS in public/editing.js. There is no UI for it.

Limits and known gaps

Desktop only in practice: a phone keyboard has no Escape.
Typing between the two presses breaks the pair. Escape, a word, Escape leaves the word where it is. Anything you type, paste or dictate counts.
A press that closed something or stopped a turn is spent, so with the slash menu open or a turn running it takes three: one for the menu or the turn, then the pair. This is what keeps a double tap on Escape — the reflex when a turn does not seem to stop — from taking the follow-up you had half typed.
A held Escape clears once, not once per repeat. The press that cleared cannot be the first half of the next pair either, so three presses clear once.
Escape while an IME is composing drops the candidate it is showing and is not counted — the key never meant the box.
In Shell mode the pair empties the command line the same way. Escape has no other job there — it belongs to whatever is running in the pane — so both presses reach the box.
The box has to have the focus. Escape with the focus nowhere returns it to the box and nothing else, which is type-to-start-a-message.
A clock that jumps backwards (suspend, an NTP step) reads as a new press rather than as a pair.