## Problem When pressing ESC, it kills **all** running background tasks and subagents at once. This is problematic for workflows that involve multiple parallel agents. ## Current behavior - User starts multiple background tasks (e.g., 3 ally agents running in parallel) - User accidentally presses ESC - All 3 agents are killed immediately ## Expected behavior Either: 1. ESC should only cancel the current foreground operation, not background tasks 2. Or show a confirmation dialog: "You have 3

ESC key kills ALL background tasks/subagents - poor UX for parallel workflows

Status Open

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 7 comments · opened Jan 27, 2026

Problem

When pressing ESC, it kills all running background tasks and subagents at once. This is problematic for workflows that involve multiple parallel agents.

Current behavior

User starts multiple background tasks (e.g., 3 ally agents running in parallel)
User accidentally presses ESC
All 3 agents are killed immediately

Expected behavior

Either:

ESC should only cancel the current foreground operation, not background tasks
Or show a confirmation dialog: "You have 3 running tasks. Kill all? [y/N]"
Or provide a way to selectively stop tasks (e.g., /tasks stop <id>)

Use case

I frequently run multiple ally agents in parallel for research/review tasks. One accidental ESC destroys all progress.

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7 Comments

github-actions[bot] · 7 months ago

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teren-papercutlabs · 7 months ago

did some testing, this breaks in 2.1.16. in 2.1.15 the behaviour is fine.

this is very critical to my workflow but there are things in latest versions i want to try too, please have this get fixed soon

teren-papercutlabs · 7 months ago

@ashwin-ant any chance you can look at this? i don't think this is intended

gentoosys · 6 months ago

+1. it is critical and make claude code unusable!!!

machu-esc · 6 months ago

same here esc not working

JanChec · 1 month ago

This is especially problematic if the main chat starts doing something wrong/pointless - ESC and the square stop button stops everything.

ryanstout · 1 month ago

please fix, this is very frustrating. The claude app is the only app that works this way. Years of muscle memory means I accidentally kill all sub-agents many times per day. A CTRL+Enter to interrupt might fix it, since thats what I reach for and the ESC is the 2nd thing.