Terminals, tabs, and panes

Where terminals live

Every process, agent, and ad hoc terminal runs on its own device and shows as a pane in its workspace's panel. It keeps running when the app quits or its pane closes.

Tabs and panes

Tabs run across the top of the panel; split the focused pane right or down. Drag a tab to reorder it. The layout, tabs, panes, and splits, is saved per workspace and restored the next time you open Spaces.

Opening a terminal

⌘⌥T opens a fresh ad hoc terminal in the selected workspace; with no workspace selected (for example while Alerts is open), it does nothing. Rename one from its sidebar row's context menu ("Rename").

The session picker

The panel's "+" button or ⌘T opens the session picker: "New terminal session" first, then the workspace's sessions that aren't already open in a pane.

Separate windows

Right-clicking a tab offers "Open Tab in New Window", and, when the tab holds more than one pane, "Open Selected Pane in New Window". A sidebar row's context menu offers "Open in New Window" directly. Closing its last pane closes the window the same way closing any other pane does (see below): its sessions keep running, unless the pane held an ad hoc terminal sitting at a bare shell prompt.

Closing a pane

⌘W or a pane's close button closes the pane; the session behind it keeps running. The one exception is an ad hoc terminal sitting at a bare shell prompt: closing that pane ends the session too. An ad hoc terminal running a program, or holding a background job, closes its pane but keeps running, still listed in the sidebar and the session picker.

Pane banners

• • "Session ended. This pane is read-only." after any exit.
• • "Session failed. The process stopped unexpectedly." when the process couldn't start, or the device lost track of it, for example after a reboot; see What survives a restart.

Keys inside a terminal

Fixed macOS keys work inside every pane: ⌘C copy, ⌘V paste, ⌘A select all, ⌘F find, ⌘E use selection for find, ⌘G and ⇧⌘G step through matches, and Esc closes find. Zoom terminal text with ⌘= and ⌘-, from 9 to 18 points; Spaces starts at 12 points and there is no reset key. One size is shared across every open pane in the app.