How to shorten commands?

[HoaSoup]

Hello,

On VS Code, I have to type /academic-research-skills:ars-lit-review instead of /ars-lit-review. It's the same for other commands. How to cut the prefix "academic-research-skills:" to shorten them?

Best regards,
Hoa

[Etogerman]

This is expected for a plugin installation. Claude Code namespaces plugin commands with the plugin name to avoid collisions, so there is no user setting that removes academic-research-skills: from the canonical command.

The canonical invocation is:

/academic-research-skills:ars-lit-review "topic"

If you want an exact /ars-lit-review shortcut, create a standalone personal command. Standalone commands are not plugin-namespaced.

Create:

• macOS/Linux: ~/.claude/commands/ars-lit-review.md
• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.claude\commands\ars-lit-review.md

with:

---
description: Short alias for the ARS literature-review mode
model: sonnet
---

Use the `academic-research-skills:academic-paper` skill in
`lit-review` mode.

User request: $ARGUMENTS

After restarting Claude Code, this can be invoked as:

/ars-lit-review "topic"

Another option for the plugin maintainers is to add an explicit name: ars-lit-review field to the command frontmatter. In Claude Code v2.1.216 and later, a plugin skill with an explicit name can also expose the bare alias when it does not conflict with another command. The namespaced form remains canonical.

I would not edit the installed plugin cache or rename its plugin.json: updates can overwrite the change, and a shorter plugin name would produce /ars:ars-lit-review, not /ars-lit-review.

References:

• Claude Code plugin namespacing
• How Claude Code determines skill and command names
• The current ARS plugin name

[Imbad0202]

@Etogerman's answer is correct on both counts, and the personal-command alias is the right user-side fix today — thank you for the well-sourced writeup.

On the maintainer side: I verified the docs claim against the current slash-commands reference, and the v2.1.216 behavior is exactly as described — an explicit frontmatter name keeps /academic-research-skills:ars-* canonical while also exposing the bare /ars-* alias when nothing else claims the name. ARS will ship explicit name: fields on all 16 commands so plugin installs get the short form without per-user setup: tracked in #633. One thing it needs before landing is a decision on pre-2.1.216 installs, where the same field changed the whole command name; details in the issue.