gemini-cli - 💡(How to fix) Fix Bug Report: Shift+Tab does not work on Windows to switch between Plan/Act modes [2 comments, 3 participants]

What happened?

Environment

• Gemini CLI version: 0.38.1
• OS: Windows 11
• Terminal: Windows Terminal 1.23.20211.0
• Shell: PowerShell / CMD (reproduced in both)

Description

On Windows, pressing Shift+Tab to switch between Plan and Act modes has no effect. The UI does not respond at all.

Root Cause Investigation

After thorough debugging, the issue is traced to the Windows Console subsystem. On Windows, Shift+Tab does not generate the standard escape sequence \x1b[Z — instead, it sends \x09 (plain Tab), with the Shift modifier completely lost.

This was verified using a raw Node.js keypress listener:

process.stdin.setRawMode(true);
process.stdin.resume();
process.stdin.on('data', (buf) => {
  console.log('hex:', buf.toString('hex'));
});

Results on Windows (tested across Windows Terminal, CMD, and native conhost.exe):

Also confirmed via readline.emitKeypressEvents:

{ sequence: '\t', name: 'tab', ctrl: false, meta: false, shift: false }

The shift field is false even when Shift is physically held down. This is a fundamental limitation of the Windows Console subsystem — unlike Unix/Linux terminals, it does not encode the Shift modifier into the byte stream for the Tab key.

Impact

The Plan/Act mode toggle is completely non-functional on Windows, across all terminal emulators and shells, because the underlying Windows Console API does not transmit the necessary escape sequence.

Suggested Fix

Consider one or more of the following:

1. Add an alternative keybinding to switch Plan/Act mode that works on Windows (e.g. Ctrl+P, Ctrl+M, or a function key).
2. Detect the Windows platform and display a notice that Shift+Tab is unsupported, along with the alternative binding.
3. Use the Windows Console API directly (ReadConsoleInput) to read raw KEY_EVENT records which do preserve the Shift modifier — though this would require platform-specific code.

Workaround

Currently the only workaround is to run Gemini CLI inside WSL, where Shift+Tab correctly sends \x1b[Z.

What did you expect to happen?

this should be work,but it doesn't work

Client information

Run gemini to enter the interactive CLI, then run the /about command.

> /about
# paste output here

Login information

No response

Anything else we need to know?

No response