Make escape-during-task interrupt threshold configurable (or expose as a separate rebindable action)

Summary

The ESC key is overloaded in the Chat context: pressing ESC clears the input when typing, and pressing ESC (or double-ESC) while a task is running interrupts it. Users who routinely double-tap ESC to clear input frequently interrupt running tasks by accident — losing in-flight
work and burning tokens on the restart.

Why this is hard to fix today

Looking at the documented keybinding actions, the only ESC-bound action in Chat context is chat:cancel (single escape). There is no separate task:interrupt or equivalent action that's bound to ESC while a task is foregrounded — so users can't remap the "escape-while-running" behavior independently of the "escape-while-typing" behavior. app:interrupt (ctrl+c) is
explicitly hardcoded.

The only workaround via ~/.claude/keybindings.json is to unbind ESC from chat:cancel entirely, which also kills ESC-to-clear-input — a net loss for users who do legitimately use ESC to clear.

Requested change

Either of these would solve it:

1. Configurable interrupt threshold. A setting like

keybindings.escapeInterruptPresses (default 2, accepts 1/2/3) so users can require triple-ESC to interrupt while still keeping single-ESC for clear-input.

1. Separate rebindable action. Split the running-task interrupt into its own action (e.g. task:interruptOnEscape) that lives in the Task context and can be unbound or rebound to a chord like escape escape escape independently of chat:cancel.

Option 2 is more flexible and consistent with how other actions are exposed; option 1 is a simpler ship.

Real-world impact

Trained muscle memory from earlier versions of Claude Code (where work chunks were shorter and double-ESC-to-clear was safe) doesn't translate cleanly now that tasks routinely run for minutes at a time. The accidental-interrupt cost is high (lost context, restart cost, lost
tokens) and the UX recovery cost is awkward (the user knows they did it, but the muscle memory is sticky).