Terminal sessions
Each Terminal window is a real shell on the connected machine, with the permissions of the account you signed in as. Open as many as the work needs; they share one connection.
Prerequisites
A connected workspace. Terminals need only SSH — a server without SFTP still gives you shells, while file features report themselves unavailable.
Steps
Open a terminal
- Terminal in the dock, or from the launcher.
- New terminal from the desktop menu.
- The + button in a Terminal window's title bar, for another shell beside it.
Extra windows are numbered — Terminal 2, Terminal 3 — and each has its own scrollback and shell.
Work in it
The window runs a full terminal emulator, so editors, pagers and colours behave normally. The strip above shows the host and the shell's working context; the footer shows Live remote console while it is connected.
Copy and paste
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Shift+C | Copy the selection |
| Ctrl+Shift+V | Paste |
| Cmd+C / Cmd+V | The same, on macOS |
| Ctrl+C | Left alone — it interrupts the remote program, as it should |
Right-click, or press Shift+F10, for Copy, Paste, Select all, Clear scrollback and New shell.
Start a fresh shell
New shell ends the current shell and opens another on the same connection — useful after changing your login files, or when a program has left the terminal in a strange state. It does not reconnect the host.
Tune it
Settings → Terminal sets the text size (11–24 px), the cursor shape (Bar, Block, Underline), whether it blinks, and the scrollback (1,000 to 100,000 lines). Changes apply to open terminals immediately; reducing scrollback discards older local output while your shells stay connected.
Expected result
A shell that behaves like any other, with output streaming as it arrives, resizing when you resize the window, and interrupts reaching the remote program. Closing the window ends that shell; minimizing keeps it running.
Limitations
- Shells do not survive a reconnect. After a dropped connection you get a fresh shell; the previous one's output is gone from the window. Run long jobs under
tmuxorscreenon the server. - Closing a Terminal window ends its shell, and the program running in it receives a hangup.
- Pasted input is capped at 64 KiB per chunk. Larger pastes are split, which some programs notice.
- No split panes or tabs inside a window — use several windows, or a multiplexer on the server.
- A terminal is not sandboxed. It has exactly the permissions of the account you connected with, including root when you connect as root.
- The font is fixed to a monospace stack; only its size is configurable.
Related guides
- Keyboard shortcuts — the complete list, including window management.
- Appearance and app settings — terminal preferences among the rest.
- Disconnect and reconnect — what a dropped connection does to shells.
- Console API — opening shells from your own app.