Dropstone Docs

Interactive session

How to work inside a Dropstone session. File references, shell escapes, slash commands, and editor integration.

Dropstone runs as an interactive session in your terminal. Each session is tied to the directory you launched it from, holds the conversation history, and stays open until you exit. This page covers how to drive a session: how to reference files, run shell commands, use slash commands, and connect an external editor.

Start a session

Run dropstone from inside a project:

dropstone

Or point it at a specific directory:

dropstone /path/to/project

Once Dropstone is up, type any natural-language prompt:

Give me a quick summary of the codebase.

File references

Reference files in your messages with @. This does a fuzzy search across the current working directory.

How is auth handled in @src/api/index.ts?

The file's contents are added to the conversation automatically, so the agent can read it without grepping for it first.

Shell commands

Start a message with ! to run a shell command. The output is added to the conversation as a tool result so the agent can react to it.

!ls -la

!git diff

Slash commands

Type / followed by a command name to perform a quick action. Most have a keyboard shortcut using ctrl+x as the leader key (configurable via Keybindings).

/help

compact

Compact the current session. Older context is summarized so newer work has room. Alias: /summarize.

Keybind: ctrl+x c

details

Toggle whether tool execution details are shown inline.

editor

Open your external editor to compose a longer message. Uses the editor set in EDITOR. See Editor setup.

Keybind: ctrl+x e

effort

Adjust the active model's reasoning depth. Opens a picker with four levels: low, medium, high, xhigh. Higher effort yields deeper reasoning at the cost of more credits and slightly higher latency. Alias: /thinking.

exit

Exit Dropstone. Aliases: /quit, /q.

Keybind: ctrl+x q

export

Export the current conversation to Markdown and open it in your editor (uses EDITOR).

Keybind: ctrl+x x

help

Show the help dialog with every slash command and keybind.

init

Guided setup for creating or updating AGENTS.md. See Rules (AGENTS.md).

models

List the available models for this session.

Keybind: ctrl+x m

new

Start a new session in the current directory. Alias: /clear.

Keybind: ctrl+x n

redo

Redo a previously undone message. Only available after /undo. File changes are restored as part of the redo.

Requires Git:

Undo and redo use Git to manage file-state snapshots, so your project must be a Git repository.

Keybind: ctrl+x r

sessions

List and switch between sessions. Aliases: /resume, /continue.

Keybind: ctrl+x l

undo

Undo the last message in the conversation. Removes the most recent user message, all subsequent responses, and any file changes made in those turns.

Requires Git:

Undo uses Git to revert file changes, so your project must be a Git repository.

Keybind: ctrl+x u

upgrade

Open the Dropstone pricing page to upgrade your plan. Use this when you need more weekly credits or access to premium tiers (Dropstone Pro, Dropstone Heavy).

Plan upgrade vs CLI upgrade:

/upgrade is the plan upgrade. To update the Dropstone CLI binary itself, run dropstone update from your shell.

usage

Show the current week's credit consumption, plan name, weekly limit, and when credits next reset.

Editor setup

The /editor and /export commands launch the editor in your EDITOR environment variable.

# Terminal editors
export EDITOR=nano
export EDITOR=vim

# GUI editors (VS Code, Cursor, VSCodium, Windsurf, Zed, etc.)
# require --wait so the editor process blocks until closed
export EDITOR="code --wait"

To make this permanent, add it to your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, and so on).

Popular options:

  • code for Visual Studio Code
  • cursor for Cursor
  • windsurf for Windsurf
  • nvim for Neovim
  • vim for Vim
  • nano for Nano
  • subl for Sublime Text
  • notepad for Windows Notepad

The --wait flag:

GUI editors like VS Code return immediately by default, which would skip your message. The --wait flag makes the editor process block until you close the file, so Dropstone can read what you wrote.

Customisation

A handful of session-level preferences live in the command palette (Ctrl+P). Search for what you want to change; the setting is remembered across sessions.

  • Hide username: drops your username from chat messages
  • Diff style: choose between adaptive (default) and single-column stacked diffs
  • Mouse capture: toggle whether the terminal handles mouse selection itself, or Dropstone does

For everything else (keybinds, formatters, config file format), see the dedicated pages: Keybindings, Formatters, Configuration.

Privacy and data retention

Your prompts, code, and conversation transcripts are never used to train models and are not retained beyond the lifetime of your session. Dropstone uses session-scoped prompt caching to reduce cost and latency, the same way Anthropic and OpenAI do: cached content is isolated to your own account, expires automatically, and is never reused for any other user or sent to model training.

These controls are enforced and reviewed by Blankline, Dropstone's parent company. Blankline's compliance team audits Dropstone's data handling on a recurring basis and retains revocation authority over the production access of any individual or system that breaches the policy.

See the Trust page for the full posture, including subprocessor disclosures and the runtime security boundary.

Ctrl+I