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The terminal app is meant to be driven from the keyboard. A handful of keys cover almost everything: Shift+Tab to change what the agent is allowed to do, Enter to send or to queue, Esc to interrupt or to close, F2 for settings, and four sigils that open a picker instead of typing text. Everything else is a slash command. This page groups the bindings by where they apply, because the same key does different things depending on what has focus. It also points out the two places where the sources disagree with each other, so you know to trust the footer strip on your own screen rather than a table on a page.

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The shortcuts sheet in the app

Type /shortcuts (alias keys) to open the sheet. It is a compact overlay listing the current bindings, with a footer line that reads Docs & guides: cortex.foundation/docs followed by the version you are running. Esc closes it.
The footer strip draws Ctrl+x:shortcuts, but in the current build Ctrl+x clears the queued follow-ups instead of opening the sheet. Until that is settled, open the sheet with /shortcuts.

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Global

Ctrl+c is described both as stop and as force-quit in the sources, so treat it as the abrupt option: use Esc to interrupt a turn and Ctrl+Q or /quit to leave cleanly.

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Composer

The four sigils only open something when they start a line. Inside a sentence they are ordinary characters. In Bash mode the prompt sigil changes from > to !, and Esc leaves it.

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While a turn is running

Queueing is the normal way to work: you do not have to wait for the agent to finish before writing the next instruction.

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Approval prompt

When the agent wants to run something that needs your say-so, a numbered prompt appears inline in the timeline and the composer waits for you. Its footer strip is drawn exactly like this, and the same four keys apply to any numbered prompt:
What each numbered option means, including what always allow remembers, is on Modes and permissions.

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Model and effort lists

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Settings and other dialogs

Settings and the pickers share one navigation style, and it accepts both arrows and vim-style keys. j, k, g and G are a navigation style inside these panels. There is no vim mode in the CLI and no command that turns one on.

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Sessions, resume and rewind

The resume picker is the one screen where the sources give two different key maps, one with favourite and delete and one with fork and new session. Read the footer strip on your own screen for that panel rather than trusting a table. Everything the picker does is also available as a slash command: /resume, /fork, /favorite, /delete.
The strip along the bottom of the screen changes with what is in focus: idle, text typed, a narrow terminal, a turn running, the queue, the model list, the effort list, an approval prompt, the MCP panel, the plugins panel, the resume picker and Bash mode all have their own. Each strip shows the keys that apply at that moment, in the form key:label separated by vertical bars, and hovering a chunk highlights it. The strips are deliberately short, so a strip is not the complete list of bindings for that screen, and the set of strips is still growing. When a key you expect is missing, check the strip first and the shortcuts sheet second.