Panels & Splits

import { Aside } from ‘@astrojs/starlight/components’;

The Terminal’s workspace is built on one concept: panels. Everything you see is a panel, and panels can be split, resized, rearranged, and swapped freely.

Panel Types

There are eight panel types, each a full-featured tool:

Panel	What It Does
Terminal	Real PTY shell sessions
Browser	Full Chromium browser with DevTools API
File Navigator	Visual file tree with git status
Git	Commit graph and branch visualization
Editor	CodeMirror 6 code editor
Canvas	Rich CLI visualizations and interactive content
Endeavors	Gee control plane: daemon, mode settings, objectives, comms, files, and guardrails (beta)
Observability	Real-time terminal and agent monitoring (beta)

Splitting

Split any panel to create more:

Cmd+D — Split horizontally (left/right)
Cmd+Shift+D — Split vertically (top/bottom)

Splits are recursive — you can split a split. There’s no limit to how many panels you can create.

Single panel:
┌──────────────────────────────┐
│                              │
│         Terminal             │
│                              │
└──────────────────────────────┘

After Cmd+D:
┌──────────────┬───────────────┐
│              │               │
│  Terminal    │   Terminal    │
│              │               │
└──────────────┴───────────────┘

After selecting right panel and Cmd+Shift+D:
┌──────────────┬───────────────┐
│              │   Terminal    │
│  Terminal    ├───────────────┤
│              │   Terminal    │
└──────────────┴───────────────┘

Changing Panel Types

Click the dropdown in the top-left corner of any panel to change its type. The panel content changes but its position stays the same.

This means you can:

Split your workspace into the layout you want
Then assign each panel the type you need

Panel Activation

Clicking inside a panel makes it active. For terminal panels specifically, click-to-focus also ensures keyboard input and wheel interactions route to the correct PTY immediately.

Resizing

Drag the divider between any two panels to resize them. Panels snap back to their original proportions when you release.

Drag and Drop

Drag a panel’s title bar to swap it with another panel. This lets you rearrange your workspace without recreating splits.

Closing Panels

Cmd+W — Close the active panel
Closing the last panel in a split removes the split

Typical Layout Pattern

File and Git panels work best as narrow strips along the side, with terminals and a browser filling the center workspace:

┌───────┬────────────────────────────────┐
│       │                                │
│ Files │      Terminal                  │
│       │      (dev server)              │
│       ├────────────────────────────────┤
│       │                                │
│ Git   │      Browser                   │
│       │      (your app)                │
│       │                                │
└───────┴────────────────────────────────┘

The center panels are where you do your work — running commands, viewing your app, coding. The side strips give you context at a glance without taking up workspace.

Naming Panels

Right-click a panel’s title bar to rename it. Named panels are easier to identify in complex layouts:

┌───────┬────────────────────────────────┐
│       │  Dev Server (terminal)         │
│Project├────────────────────────────────┤
│(files)│  My App (browser)              │
│       ├────────────────────────────────┤
│Commits│  Gee-Code (terminal)           │
│(git)  │                                │
└───────┴────────────────────────────────┘

Persistent Layouts

Your panel arrangement saves automatically and restores when you relaunch The Terminal. You don’t need to rebuild your workspace every session.

Next Steps

Spaces — organize panels into separate workspace tabs
Workspace Presets — save and load named layouts