Skip to content

Terminal Panel

The Terminal panel provides real shell sessions directly within The Terminal. It’s not a terminal emulator pretending to be a shell — it’s a genuine PTY (pseudo-terminal) connected to your system’s shell.

  • Real PTY — connects directly to your system’s pseudo-terminal
  • Full color support — 256 colors and true color (24-bit)
  • Dotfile support — your .bashrc, .zshrc, .vimrc all work
  • Multiple sessions — run multiple terminals side by side
  • Status tracking — see running processes and session info
  • npm detection — automatic project context for Node.js projects

Each Terminal panel represents a single shell session. You can have multiple terminal panels open simultaneously, each running its own independent shell session.

Click the + button in a terminal panel header to spawn a new shell session. The new session uses your default shell (typically zsh on macOS).

The terminal panel header shows status information:

  • Working directory — current path
  • Git branch — if in a git repository
  • npm/package info — if in a Node.js project

The Terminal supports:

  • ANSI colors — standard 16-color escape sequences
  • 256 colors — extended palette escape sequences
  • True color — 24-bit RGB escape sequences

Your terminal capabilities are detected automatically. If your terminal reports support for true color, The Terminal will use it.

Your shell configuration files work exactly as they would in your regular terminal:

  • .bashrc / .bash_profile for Bash
  • .zshrc / .zprofile for Zsh
  • .vimrc / .config/nvim for Neovim
  • .inputrc for Readline

Any aliases, functions, or environment variables defined in these files will be available.

When The Terminal detects a package.json in the current directory, it automatically:

  • Shows the project name and version in the panel header
  • Provides quick access to npm scripts
  • Tracks the development server status
ShortcutAction
Cmd/Ctrl + TNew terminal session
Cmd/Ctrl + WClose current session
Cmd/Ctrl + /Focus filter