Browser panes

A real web page as a pane in the grid: the OS browser engine embedded in TermHQ, with the same drag, stash, resize and maximize moves as a terminal.

A pane in TermHQ does not have to be a terminal. Ctrl+Shift+B opens a browser pane — a web page tiled in the grid beside your shells, with the same header, the same drag, stash, resize and maximize moves, and the same place in your saved workspace.

The page is rendered by your operating system’s own browser engine, embedded directly in the window. Nothing is streamed and no input is faked: scrolling, typing, text selection, hover, video and IME are the engine’s, exactly as in the browser you already use.

Opening one

Three ways, all equivalent:

• The globe in the title bar, just right of the favorites star
• Ctrl+Shift+B
• The command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) — “New browser pane”

Settings → Browser → Browser button on the titlebar removes the globe if you would rather have the space. Turning it off moves it into the menu behind the + button’s caret, as a Browser row after your shells; the chord and the palette keep working either way. (With SSH turned on, that menu ends with Connect via SSH… — see SSH connections.)

Where it lands is Settings → Browser → New panes open. Point it at localhost:3000 and the chord drops you on your dev server; leave it empty and you get a blank pane with the URL bar waiting.

A link in a terminal can open straight into a pane: Ctrl+Shift+click it (⌘+Shift+click on macOS) and it opens in a new browser pane at that address. A plain Ctrl+click (⌘+click) sends it to your system browser instead.

Every browser pane is a native webview with its own renderer process, so opening a tenth one onto the grid asks first — Open anyway, or Don’t warn again. Stashed panes are not counted. Settings → Browser → Warn before the tenth browser pane is the switch.

The URL bar

It reads what you type the way a browser’s does:

The search engine is Settings → Browser → Search engine — DuckDuckGo (the default), Google, Bing or Brave. Web addresses and localhost ports are never searched; they open directly.

A browser pane may only navigate to http, https and about. Type a scheme it is not allowed to open — file:, vscode: — and it becomes a search rather than an error, because the alternative is a URL bar that silently swallows what you typed and looks broken.

Enter navigates. Clicking into the bar selects the current address so typing replaces it. Esc discards a half-typed address, restores the page’s current URL, and hands the keyboard back to the page. A blank pane opens with the bar already focused. While you are typing in it, the chords that act on panes stand down, so closing or stashing cannot fire from the address bar; only the launchers — the command palette, Settings, the workspace picker and the like — dictation, and the shortcuts that move focus to a neighboring pane still answer. Those last ones work from the pane’s find bar too, so the keyboard can always leave a browser pane.

Back, forward and reload sit to the left of the bar. The back and forward buttons dim when there is nowhere to go, like a real browser’s, and while a page loads, Reload turns into Stop. Beside the address, a lock means the page arrived over HTTPS and a warning sign means plain HTTP — except for this machine’s own addresses (localhost, 127.x.x.x, [::1]), where a dev server without encryption is normal and a warning would be noise.

The ⋯ button near Close is always there, at every width. It holds Rename, Web devtools — the full inspector for that page, in its own window — and Copy address.

The pane’s title follows the page’s. Rename it — right-click the header, press F2 on it, choose Rename from the ⋯ menu, or run “Rename the focused pane” from the command palette — and your name sticks instead, the same as a terminal. Clear the name to go back to the page’s title. Double-clicking the header maximizes the pane.

The focused pane keeps its speaker, Stash and Maximize in view. Other panes fold them away until the pointer is over them, and the page title glides into the space they were holding, un-truncating as far as the address bar can spare. The one thing that never folds is a muted page’s speaker — it pins itself beside Close and stays visible, because silence with nothing on screen to explain it reads as a fault rather than a setting.

On a narrow pane, the page title drops away. On an even tighter pane, back, forward, reload, the speaker, Stash and Maximize fold into the ⋯ menu as well, so the URL bar, ⋯ and Close remain reachable at every width. A thin sweep along the bottom of the header shows when a page is loading. The first real page also gets a simple pulsing loading surface until it is ready, instead of an unexplained empty pane.

When a page won’t load

A page that cannot be reached does not leave the pane blank. A Page unavailable card keeps the address you asked for, says why, and offers Retry, Copy address, and Open externally, which hands the address to your system browser. A load that never finishes gets the same card after 30 seconds — and if the page does arrive later, it still shows.

A server’s own error page, such as a 404, is still a page: it stays visible like any other. And if the browser surface itself cannot be created, the pane says why and offers Retry.

Sound

Pages play audio like any browser. Settings → Browser → Sound in new panes turns that off for new panes, and each pane’s header has a speaker that mutes or unmutes that one page live. The speaker stays visible while a pane is muted, so silence is never a mystery.

Muting works on Windows and macOS. On macOS it goes through WebKit, and on a version of macOS whose WebKit cannot control page audio, pressing the speaker shows an error saying so rather than pretending. A pane’s mute is a choice for that session: the workspace does not remember it.

It is a pane like any other

Everything the grid does, a browser pane does:

• Drag its header to move, swap or grow it, exactly as with a terminal
• Drag the gutter beside it to give the page the width it wants — the reason resizing exists at all, since a web page has a natural width and a terminal does not
• Stash it — the page stays loaded and keeps playing; restoring brings back the same scroll position
• Maximize it — its header button, or a double-click on the header — and restore the grid the same way; arrange it from the keyboard, move focus to it

Its header wears a globe where a terminal’s wears a prompt, so the kind of pane reads at a glance, and it renames the way a terminal’s does: F2 or a right-click on the header.

Panes glide into place when you swap, move or resize them, with a browser pane on screen too: the page rides along as a still picture, keeping its size while the pane reshapes around it, and comes back live where it lands. While you resize the window, a border between panes or the sidebar, the page holds still in the same way until you stop, so it never runs ahead of its pane. A new browser pane settles into its cell, a closed one fades from its place, and stashing and restoring fly it into and out of the shelf. Settings → Appearance → Animate panes turns all of that off, and so does reduced motion in your system settings — see Pane motion.

Closing or stashing the browser pane you are using hands focus to the pane you used before it, so the keyboard always has somewhere to go. And a file dropped on a browser pane is turned away with a note rather than opened: a browser pane opens web addresses, not files.

A link that opens a new tab — target="_blank", or a window.open from the page — opens another browser pane rather than an operating-system window. Cloning a browser pane opens a sibling at the same URL. Neither takes the home page: only the panes you open yourself do.

One move a terminal has that a browser pane does not: closing it is final. The undo window exists because a closed terminal’s shell is parked and still running in the background, and a page has nothing parked to come back to.

Workspaces remember pages

A saved workspace stores each browser pane’s address and its place in the grid, so reopening it puts the pages back where they were. Logins and cookies live in the engine’s own profile, so “signed into the dashboard” survives a restart.

Browser panes are part of the window, not of the shell host, so a full quit closes their pages and reopening navigates back to them. Shells are the thing that keeps running across a quit — see Persistent sessions.

Keys over a page

On Windows and macOS, TermHQ’s own chords keep working while a page has the keyboard: pane focus, arrange mode, stash, close, maximize and the pickers are all intercepted before the page sees them, exactly as if a terminal were focused. After a chord runs, the keyboard lands where the result needs it — back in the page, or in the app for arrange mode’s arrows and a picker’s digits. The dictation chord is caught too, and over a page it types what you say into the page’s focused text field — see Dictation.

A short list stays deliberately with the page. Copy, because the page’s version is the one you want. The agent picker, because it would only type into a terminal that is not there. And on Windows, Ctrl+F opens the engine’s own find bar and Ctrl+= / - / 0 are the engine’s page zoom.

On macOS, ⌘+F opens TermHQ’s own find bar on the pane, which drives the page’s search: Enter and Shift+Enter step through matches, it says when there are none, and Esc hands the keyboard back to the page. ⌘+= / - / 0 zoom the page, and the usual browser keys work while the page has the keyboard — ⌘+L for the address bar, ⌘+[ and ⌘+] for back and forward, ⌘+R to reload — unless you have bound one of those chords to something else.

Ultra focus (Ctrl+Shift+U) hands the page every key except its own toggle.

The page has no keys to the app

A browser pane loads whatever you point it at, so it is given no authority at all. Browser surfaces are in none of the application’s capabilities, and navigation is limited to http, https and about — never a local file, a custom protocol, or TermHQ’s own interface.

The fence doing most of the work is the third: remote origins are refused any channel into TermHQ wholesale, a layer below the point where a page could ask. Development builds report what a page can see after every load, as a drift detector — the bridge object is visible to the page; what it cannot do is use it.

What v1 does not do yet

Stated plainly rather than discovered later:

• Windows and macOS have both had a full pass, including the frozen frame described below and the pane’s rounded bottom corners. Linux support is pending.
• Anything that must cover the grid covers the page. A native page cannot be painted over by the interface, so when a modal, menu, drag preview, or similar overlay needs the space, the pane shows a frozen frame of the page for as long as the overlay is up, then goes live again. Video keeps playing underneath; it simply looks paused while covered. This includes opening the waiting-pane list, closed-pane list or stash shelf. Their status-bar buttons sit below the grid and do not freeze the page on their own. The frame is a courtesy rather than a guarantee — a pane nobody can see does not pay to capture one, and neither does a second overlay arriving right behind the last, where the previous correctly sized frame or the pane’s background is shown.
• Downloads use the engine’s own default handling.
• One browser profile, shared by every workspace. Per-workspace profiles are a real feature with real questions, and are deferred rather than faked.