Terminal Usage

Braide includes an embedded terminal, giving you command-line access alongside your agent sessions.

Opening the Terminal

  1. Select or create a session
  2. Click the terminal toggle button in the prompt input area
  3. The terminal panel appears below the session content

Each session has its own independent terminal instance.

Embedded terminal

Using the Terminal

The terminal provides a full shell environment:

  • Run any commands available in your system shell
  • The working directory is set to the session's worktree — an isolated git working copy unique to this session (not the project root). See Worktrees for details.
  • Command history and standard shell features are available
  • Output is displayed in real time

Resizing

The terminal panel can be resized by dragging:

  1. Hover over the divider between the session content and the terminal
  2. Click and drag up or down to adjust the height
  3. The height is saved per-session and restored when you reopen the terminal

Toolbar

The vertical toolbar on the left edge of the terminal provides quick actions:

  • Close (red square) — Terminates the shell process and closes the panel
  • Search (magnifying glass) — Opens the find-in-terminal bar (also available via ⌘F / Ctrl+F)
  • Clear (trash icon) — Clears the visible terminal output and the server-side scrollback buffer
  • Copy (clipboard icon) — Copies the entire terminal buffer to the clipboard; shows a brief checkmark when complete
  • Restart (appears only when the process has exited) — Spawns a new shell session

Keyboard Shortcuts

While the terminal has focus:

ShortcutAction
⌘A / Ctrl+ASelect all terminal content
⌘C / Ctrl+CCopy selected text (sends SIGINT if nothing is selected)
⌘F / Ctrl+FOpen find-in-terminal search bar
EscapeClose the search bar

Terminal States

  • Open — Terminal is visible and connected
  • Closed — Terminal is hidden but the process may still be running
  • Exited — The shell process has ended; the terminal shows "[Process exited]"

Spotting Running Terminals from the Sidebar

When a terminal is running on the server, two indicators light up so you can find it without opening every session:

  • A green dot appears in the corner of the terminal toggle button inside the session, showing that the embedded shell is alive even when the panel is closed.
  • The same green dot appears in the top-right corner of the session's status icon in the sidebar, so you can scan across sessions and see which ones have an active terminal. Hovering the dot shows a tooltip.

Both indicators reflect the same backend state and turn off the moment the shell process exits — either because you closed it from the terminal panel's close button, or because the process ended on its own.

Reviving a Terminal

If a terminal connection is lost (e.g., after a page refresh), Braide can revive it. The terminal process continues running in the background, and reconnecting restores the session.

Closing

Click the terminal toggle button again to close the terminal panel. You can also fully close the terminal connection from the terminal's close button, which terminates the shell process.