Terminal View

The Terminal view provides a full-featured terminal emulator built on xterm.js with GPU-accelerated rendering, shell integration, split panes, and deep integration with the Crab workflow.

Accessing the Terminal

• Click the Terminal icon in the activity bar
• Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+` (backtick)
• Quick terminal: Cmd+Shift+T opens a floating terminal panel

Features

Terminal Emulator

Built on @xterm/xterm with addons:

• WebGL renderer — GPU-accelerated for smooth scrolling
• Unicode 11 — full emoji and CJK character support
• Web links — clickable URLs (Cmd+click)
• Search — find text in scrollback (Cmd+F)
• Clipboard — system clipboard integration
• Serialization — save/restore terminal state

Split Panes

Create multiple terminal panes:

• Horizontal split — side-by-side terminals
• Vertical split — stacked terminals
• Resizable via drag handles
• Each pane runs an independent shell session

Shell Detection

The terminal detects the user's login shell:

• Reads $SHELL environment variable
• Falls back to /bin/zsh (macOS) or /bin/bash (Linux)
• Inherits the user's shell configuration (.zshrc, .bashrc)

Pre-Warmed Pool

Terminals spawn instantly because the main process pre-warms 2 PTY shells on startup. When you open a terminal, it connects to an already-running shell rather than waiting for shell initialization.

Shell Integration

When supported by the shell, the terminal tracks:

• Command boundaries — knows where each command starts/ends
• Exit codes — shows success/failure per command
• Command duration — timing for long-running commands
• Working directory — tracks cd for breadcrumb display

Color Schemes

Multiple built-in color schemes:

• Dark (default)
• Light
• Solarized Dark/Light
• Monokai
• Nord
• Dracula
• Custom (user-defined)

Schemes are selectable per-terminal or globally in Settings.

Scrollback

Configurable scrollback buffer:

• Default: 10,000 lines
• Configurable: 1,000 – 100,000 lines
• Memory estimate shown in settings
• Scrollback persists across view switches (not app restarts)

Paste Guard

Protects against dangerous paste operations:

• Detects multi-line pastes (potential command injection)
• Detects sudo commands in pasted content
• Shows confirmation dialog with paste analysis
• Configurable sensitivity

Notifications

Desktop notifications for long-running commands:

• Notifies when a command completes after the terminal loses focus
• Configurable minimum duration threshold
• Shows command name and exit code in notification

Bookmarks

Save frequently-used commands as bookmarks:

• Click the bookmark icon next to a completed command
• Access bookmarks from the toolbar dropdown
• Execute bookmarked commands with one click

Terminal Presets

Quick-launch terminals with pre-configured commands:

• "Crab status" — opens terminal and runs crab status
• "Git log" — opens terminal with git log --oneline
• Custom presets definable in settings

Layout

The Terminal view contains:

• Toolbar — buttons for New terminal, Split Horizontal, Split Vertical, Color Scheme selector, Search, and Settings
• Breadcrumb bar — shows current working directory and branch
• Terminal pane(s) — full xterm.js terminal emulator with GPU-accelerated rendering
• Status bar — shell name, scrollback usage, character encoding, last exit code, and command duration

Keyboard Shortcuts

Font Settings

Terminal font is configurable separately from the editor:

• Font family (monospace fonts recommended)
• Font size (8–24px)
• Line height
• Font weight
• Ligatures (on/off)

Crash Recovery

If a terminal session crashes:

• A banner appears with the error message
• Option to restart the shell in the same pane
• Scrollback from before the crash is preserved
• Other terminal panes are unaffected

Integration

• Worktree context menu → "Open terminal here" opens a terminal pre-cd'd to the worktree path
• Command palette commands can execute in the terminal
• Terminal output can be copied into issues or diagnostic reports