Tabs and windows

A window is a menu bar over a strip of tabs. Each tab owns its own shell on its own pseudo-terminal; no two tabs share a session. Windows share the settings, the theme and the Settings window, and nothing else.

Tabs

A new tab starts in the current tab’s directory, read from the shell process, unless its profile names a directory of its own. On Windows the directory cannot be read yet, so new tabs there start in your home directory. A tab closes on its own when its shell exits.

The jump chords have no menu items. The command palette lists the open tabs by title, each with the chord that reaches it.

The tab strip

• It hides itself while one tab is open, and the shell gains the row. Settings → Appearance → Tabs → Hide the tab bar with a single tab turns that off.
• Tabs tile the full width and shrink as more are added, down to 60 pixels; past that the strip overflows rather than drawing tabs too narrow to read.
• The + button opens a tab with the default profile. The chevron beside it drops the list of shell profiles.
• Drag a tab to reorder it. An accent edge shows which side of the target it will land on. Reordering never touches the shell inside.
• Hover a tab to see its directory in full, with your home directory written as ~.
• Double-click a tab to rename it.

The tab menu

Right-click a tab for a menu that acts on that tab, not on the selected one:

• New Tab, New Tab With (the profile list), Duplicate Tab
• Rename Tab…
• Close Tab, Close Other Tabs, Close Tabs to the Right
• Move Tab Left, Move Tab Right

Items that cannot apply, such as Move Tab Left on the first tab, are disabled. The Window menu also carries Rename Tab… and Duplicate Tab for the selected tab, so the keyboard and the palette can reach them.

Rename, reopen and duplicate

• Rename. A name you give a tab outranks everything else the tab would show: the shell’s title, the running program and the directory. The window title follows it too. Leave the field empty to go back to the automatic title.
• Reopen Closed Tab brings back the last tab you closed in this window: the same shell or profile, the directory it was in when it closed, its name and its old place in the strip. Its scrollback is gone with the process. The last ten are kept. A shell that exited by itself is not among them, since nobody closed it.
• Duplicate Tab opens another tab running the same shell or profile, in the directory this one is in now, right beside it.

Activity and bell marks

A tab you are not looking at shows a dot after its title when something happened in it:

• Activity: output that arrived after two quiet seconds, such as a build finishing or a prompt coming back. A tab that streams continuously is marked once.
• Bell: a program rang the bell. It outranks activity and uses a different color.

The colors are the theme’s cyan and yellow. Selecting the tab clears the mark, and a new tab’s own first prompt does not count.

Closing asks when something is running

Closing a tab whose shell has a child process asks first, and names what is running: vim, an ssh session, a build, or a background job such as sleep 60 &, which dies with the tab just the same. An idle prompt closes at once. Cancel is the default button.

Every deliberate close goes through the same question: the close button, the menu items, the chord, Close Other Tabs and Close Tabs to the Right (one question for the whole set), and closing the window. Settings → Terminal → Session → Ask before closing a running tab turns it off.

Quitting with Cmd+Q on macOS does not ask yet. On Linux and Windows there is no Quit item, so quitting is closing the last window, which does ask.

Windows

A new window opens offset from the window it was asked for from, on the same screen. Closing the last window quits Termina.

Titles and the directory

The title bar shows the selected tab’s title and follows it live. Each one is chosen in this order:

The directory is read from the operating system rather than from the prompt, so it works with any prompt framework and needs nothing configured. See Working directory. A program that sets a title and later clears it, as vim does on exit, gives the directory back. On Windows the directory is not shown yet.

Window size and position

The window’s size, position and maximized state are remembered across launches. A size saved on a larger display is clamped to the screen that is actually there, and a position on a monitor that has gone is pulled back onto one that exists, so the title bar is never left out of reach.

Full screen

F11 (Ctrl+Cmd+F on macOS) enters and leaves full screen. So does the full-screen button on the zoom row in the View and right-click menus, and Full Screen in the command palette.

Escape does not leave full screen. It belongs to the program in the terminal: the first Escape in vim leaves insert mode, as it should.

Under GNOME’s fractional scaling on Wayland, a full-screen window can be sized and placed wrongly, because JavaFX runs through XWayland there. Maximizing is unaffected.