The Terminal screen
What the Terminal screen is, how tabs and panels are organized, and what keeps running when you leave it.
Terminal is one of a project’s four screens — together with Canvas, Chat and Browser — and it is a place of its own. It shows terminal. What you open there does not appear on the other screens, and what is open on the other screens does not appear here.
Switching screens changes what you are looking at, not what is running: sessions live in the app’s main process and stay up while you work elsewhere.
What the screen shows
- Tab bar at the top: one tab per session. This is where you create a new tab, pick the shell (on Windows) and reach each tab’s actions.
- Panels inside the tab: a tab can hold a single panel or several, split horizontally or vertically.
- Session content: the terminal itself, with scrollable history, search and selection.
- Quick commands bar: shortcuts to insert text or fire commands you use all the time.
Sessions, tabs and panels
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Session | A running process — a shell or an agent CLI — with its own history. It is the unit that stays alive when you switch screens. |
| Tab | How you look at a session on the Terminal screen. A tab holds one or more panels. |
| Panel | A division inside the tab, with its own session, its own title and its own font size. |
Renaming, pinning, coloring, splitting and closing are tab or panel operations — not project operations. The project does not change when you rearrange the terminal.
Shell or agent
If you create a session without choosing anything, you get a shell — on Windows, the tab menu offers PowerShell, CMD Prompt, Git Bash and WSL. You can also open an agent CLI directly: it comes up in the panel like any other session, and writing to the agent follows the same rules as an agent on any other surface.
When you create the session already with an agent, the agent is still starting up at the moment the command returns. Writing to it right away arrives scrambled. Wait for it to go idle before sending text — Working with an agent in the Terminal details this.
What keeps running
- Switching to Canvas, Chat or Browser does not interrupt any session.
- Maximizing a card on the Canvas, changing zoom or rearranging panels does not interrupt either.
- Closing and reopening the app does not resurrect processes: what comes back is the screen, with redrawn history (see Resuming after a restart).
Limits worth knowing from the start
- History has a ceiling. What is kept for restoration is limited by bytes, and whatever exceeds the limit is cut — the oldest part does not come back.
- Clearing the screen discards the visible history of that panel.
- A session created from a Canvas card may take a few seconds to show up in the session list.
- Ending sessions is destructive. One of the commands ends every session in the workspace at once, including the one you called it from.
Where to go next
- Creating and navigating between sessions — open a shell or agent, switch tabs, list what exists.
- Reading, sending and waiting — read history and talk to a process.
- Organizing panels and tabs — split, expand, rename, pin and color.
- Terminal command reference — the command-line commands and their options.