Skip to content
HappyVibe

Terminal

Want to type a command yourself? You get a real shell, in a tab, already in your project folder. This screen decides how it looks and behaves. “These settings are global”: they apply in every workspace.

Where to find it

Section titled “Where to find it”

App features → Terminal in the sidebar.

What’s on the screen

Section titled “What’s on the screen”

Every row has its own Reset button, which appears once you’ve changed that row. Reset all, at the top right, puts every setting back to its default in one click. Style, appearance and behaviour changes reach terminals you already have open, so you can watch them take effect. Shell changes apply to the next terminal you open.

Style

Section titled “Style”

“Three presets. Every one is contrast-checked, so no colour is unreadable on its own background.” Each card shows a real preview in that palette.

  • Workshop (the default): “The app’s own ink and paper — the treatment chat code blocks use”
  • Paper: “Cream, so the whole window is one temperature. Best for bright rooms”
  • Carbon: “The palette de-warmed, neutral and high-contrast for long sessions”

Appearance

Section titled “Appearance”
  • Font family: a list of the monospace fonts on your computer, each drawn in its own font so you can see it before you pick. The one that “ships with the app” is marked. If a font you chose is later uninstalled, the row says so and the terminal falls back to a system monospace font.
  • Font size, Line height, Letter spacing.
  • Cursor style (bar, block or underline) and Cursor blink.
  • Minimum contrast ratio: “Auto-lightens unreadable output from a badly-behaved program. The palettes above already pass on their own.”

Shell

Section titled “Shell”

“What gets started, and in what environment. Leave the path blank to use your login shell.” Your login shell is the shell your computer starts for you, with your usual settings loaded. On Windows the sentence ends “to use the default shell.”

  • Shell path: leave it blank, and HappyVibe picks the right shell for you. Type a path only if you want a different one. (The details: on macOS and Linux it’s your login shell, $SHELL, falling back to /bin/zsh on macOS and /bin/bash on Linux. On Windows it’s PowerShell 7, then Windows PowerShell, then the Command Prompt.)
  • Shell arguments: “Space-separated. -l starts a login shell, so your real PATH and version managers work.” On Windows it reads “Space-separated. While the path is blank, the default shell starts without -l, because PowerShell rejects it.”
  • Extra environment: “One KEY=value per line. Merged over the inherited environment.”

Behaviour

Section titled “Behaviour”
  • Scrollback: how many lines each terminal keeps.
  • Copy on select: copies text as soon as you select it.
  • Right-click pastes: “Off by default — a right-click opens the context menu instead.”
  • Warn on multi-line paste (on by default): “A safety setting, not a preference: a pasted block ending in a newline runs the moment it lands.” With it on, pasting text that contains or ends with a line break asks first, for example “Paste and run 3 lines? A pasted newline executes immediately.” Every paste asks: from the keyboard, with a right-click (when Right-click pastes is on), and into an agent terminal’s card.
  • Confirm close while running (on by default): “Closing a terminal tab kills its process.” With it on, closing a tab while a command is still running asks first.
  • Bell: off, visual (a quick flash) or sound.
  • Word separators: “Characters that end a word for double-click selection.”

Open a terminal

Section titled “Open a terminal”
  1. In a workspace, click the + at the end of the tab strip.
  2. Choose New terminal. The shortcut is ⌘T on macOS and Ctrl+T on Windows and Linux.

The terminal opens in a tab, at your project folder. To search its output, press ⌘F on macOS or Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux while it has focus.

When the shell in a terminal exits (after you type exit, for example), the tab stays open so you can still read the output. A bar along the bottom says so, for example “process exited (code 0)”, and names the shortcut that closes the tab, including one you’ve changed on Keyboard shortcuts.

Close a terminal

Section titled “Close a terminal”

Closing a terminal tab stops whatever is running in it. If something is still running and Confirm close while running is on, HappyVibe asks first, naming the program, for example “npm is still running. Close anyway?” Click Cancel, and the terminal keeps running.

During a session

Section titled “During a session”

The agent can open terminals of its own, for things that keep running, like a dev server or a watcher. Each command it runs there goes through the same permission check as any other command: it asks, unless one of your rules already allows it.

An agent terminal doesn’t open a tab. It shows up as a circle in the row at the top of the conversation. Hover the circle to see its last few lines. Click it to open its card, which shows the command, what the agent says it’s for, how long it has been running, and a live terminal you can type into. The card has three buttons:

  • Open as tab: “Move this terminal into a tab of its own”
  • ◼ Stop: “Stop this terminal and the process in it”. It doesn’t ask first, so you can always stop an agent terminal in one click.
  • ✕: “Close — the terminal keeps running, and its circle stays in the row”

Agent terminals use the same style and appearance settings as yours, and the same Warn on multi-line paste.

Section titled “Related”