Visual Studio Code 1.109.5 – Slash commands, session renaming, and Kitty keyboard support
The newest VS Code build brings three practical upgrades that actually touch the day‑to‑day workflow of anyone who spends time with background agents. This guide explains how slash commands now work inside prompt files, why being able to rename agent sessions matters, and what the long‑awaited Kitty keyboard integration looks like in practice.
Slash commands – finally a shortcut for prompts
Background agents have always felt a bit like a secret club: you type a request, wait for the AI, and hope it understood the context. With 1.109.5 you can prepend “/” to invoke built‑in actions directly from prompt files, hooks, or skill definitions. For example, typing /clear wipes the current conversation buffer without opening a separate command palette, while /save my‑notes.txt writes the latest output to a file on the fly. This eliminates the need for extra mouse clicks and makes the chat feel more like a programmable console.
The real benefit shows up when custom hooks are in play. A user who chained a linting step after every AI suggestion reported that adding “/lint” at the end of the prompt automatically ran their linter script, captured errors, and fed them back into the conversation. That kind of inline automation would have required a separate terminal pane before.
Renaming background agent sessions – organization for the lazy
Until now VS Code assigned generic names like “Session 1” to each new AI chat, making it hard to locate past discussions in the sidebar. The update adds a rename option right‑clicking the session title. Changing “Session 3” to “Dockerfile review” instantly groups related queries together and improves the search filter.
A typical scenario involves a developer juggling multiple code reviews across branches. After renaming each session, the side panel becomes a quick index rather than a confusing list of numbers. The change is purely cosmetic but saves a few seconds of scrolling every day – and those seconds add up when switching contexts repeatedly.
Kitty keyboard support for everyone
Kitty’s “keyboard mode” has been a niche feature that only power users could enable via hidden flags. Version 1.109.5 lifts the restriction, allowing any VS Code install to accept Kitty’s rich key‑binding protocol. The result is smoother navigation between editor panes, faster snippet insertion, and native support for Kitty’s “copy on select” behavior without extra extensions.
Early adopters noted that the new integration reduced latency when sending large blocks of code from a terminal session into the editor. One user who frequently copies log dumps described the experience as “finally feeling like the terminal and editor are speaking the same language.”
