Use /clear to Wipe Context and Start Fresh

Sometimes you don't want to summarise — you want a clean slate. /clear wipes the conversation history entirely so you can start a new task without any baggage from the previous one.

/clear

Unlike /compact, which condenses the conversation into a summary, /clear removes everything. Claude Code keeps your settings, CLAUDE.md, and tool permissions intact — but the conversation itself is gone.

This is the right move when:

• You've finished one task and want to tackle something completely unrelated
• The conversation has gone sideways and a summary won't help
• You've hit context limits and need a hard reset rather than a trim

The key difference between /clear and just quitting and restarting is convenience — you stay in the same session with your shell history and environment intact. No need to re-navigate to your project or reconfigure anything.

A useful mental model: think of /compact as tidying your desk, and /clear as wiping it completely clean.

Use /compact to save context; use /clear to escape it entirely.