Documentation

Getting started

Open your first terminals, tile them, and learn the handful of shortcuts that matter.

On this page

A new workspace starts with a single terminal running your default shell. After that, launching TermHQ resumes the workspace you were last in — panes, shells, directories and layout — rather than starting over. You can change that in Settings → Workspaces → On startup, or pick a different workspace from the picker every time.

Everything else is built on two ideas: panes are tiled rather than stacked, and the shells inside them are not owned by the window.

Your first panes

Opening Command Prompt from the shell picker, then a favorite folder.

The + button in the title bar opens another pane running your default shell. Its caret opens a list of every shell TermHQ found on your machine: PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt, Git Bash and each WSL distribution on Windows; whatever /etc/shells reports on macOS. Once Settings → SSH → SSH connections is on, the same list ends with Connect via SSH…, which opens a connection to another machine as a pane — see SSH connections.

Panes tile automatically — with two open you get two columns, with four you get a 2×2 grid. Open as many as you like; there is no limit, and the grid grows to hold them. Drag the space between two panes to change how the room is divided.

Not every pane has to be a shell. The globe in the title bar — or Ctrl+Shift+B — opens a browser pane, a real web page tiled beside your terminals. Ctrl+Shift+E opens an editor pane, which holds files as tabs. Both take the same grid controls as a terminal. Terminals and editors can also move to another open workspace from their header menus, carrying the running process or unsaved text with them.

With no panes open, the start panel offers New terminal, Find a command, Workspaces, and your favorite directories. If your panes are all stashed, it points you back to the shelf. Workspace selection also lives at the far right of the bottom status bar, beside Stash.

Favorite folders

The star in the title bar is always available. With no favorites saved, it opens Add favorite folders. Choose one or more folders in the system folder picker, drop folders onto the card, or select suggestions from the terminals open in this window. The empty start panel’s Add favorite folders button and Ctrl+Shift+L (⌘+Shift+L on macOS) open it too.

The card keeps a steady height while you choose. The arrow keys move between folders and controls; Enter performs the action named in the footer. A longer suggestion list offers a filter. Ctrl+Enter (⌘+Enter) selects all suggestions shown, or clears them when all are selected. Add favorites saves the chosen folders; Not now or Esc closes without saving. While filtering, Esc clears the filter first.

Once saved, the star opens your favorites, and the shortcut opens the numbered picker. Right-click a favorite for other shells and agent launchers. Settings → General → Favorites manages the list and its order.

Make the interface comfortable

In Settings → Appearance, choose Compact or Comfortable interface density and scale the app’s labels and controls from 100% to 150%. Terminal and editor text keep their own size settings, and these options work with every theme.

The same page can put a picture, a GIF or a looping video behind your terminals. Background keeps a small library — Add… copies a file in — and Transparency (25% by default), Blur, Fit and, for a video, Speed tune it. The text stays solid at any setting, and the background is the same in every workspace, like the theme.

Two more switches live there. Dim unfocused panes, off by default, washes every pane but the one you are typing into toward the background. Animate panes, on by default, lets panes glide, fly and fade as they move; turn it off and they jump straight into place.

Backdrop blur and Backdrop darkness set how the window dims and blurs behind the command palette, the workspace picker, Settings, the Worktrees view, and Git’s History and diffs: blur from off to 12 px (2 px by default), darkness from off to 80% (40% by default; a light theme dims more gently). The title bar stays live above the backdrop: minimize, maximize and close still work, and the bar still drags the window.

Once anything on the page differs from how TermHQ ships, it ends with Reset Appearance, which names what it will put back and asks first. Your themes, backgrounds and icon packs stay installed.

Need a little more room for file names or Git changes? Drag the sidebar’s inner edge to widen it. Its original width is the minimum, the maximum is bounded, and a double-click on that edge resets it. See Configuration for keyboard controls.

Layouts

Two presets live in the title bar:

Grid — kept square-ish. Four panes make a 2×2, five to nine go three wide, ten to sixteen go four wide, and onwards from there.
Columns — every terminal a full-height strip.

Each workspace remembers which of the two it uses.

Panes can also be dragged by their headers to move, swap and grow, or rearranged entirely from the keyboard. See Panes and layout.

The shortcuts worth learning first

Action	Shortcut
New terminal	`Ctrl`+`J`
New browser pane	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`B`
New editor pane	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`E`
Delete the focused terminal	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`D`
Move focus between panes	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+arrow
Command palette	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`P`
Settings, with search focused	`Ctrl`+`P`
Workspace picker	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`W`
Jump to the newest waiting pane	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`N`

If you only learn one, learn the command palette: it lists every action by name with its shortcut beside it, or unassigned where it has none, so the rest do not have to be memorized first. It also opens your favorite folders, shells, agents, other workspaces, saved and recent SSH targets (once SSH is on), themes and Settings pages, and it lists your open panes: choose one to focus it, bringing it back from the stash shelf or out from behind a maximized pane if it has to. With nothing typed it leads with what you ran recently.

The Command palette button just left of Settings in the title bar opens the same list with a click.

Scopes under its search field — All, Commands, Git, Panes, Themes and Workspaces — narrow the list to one kind of thing; Tab steps through them, or start your search with a scope’s name and a space. Ctrl+D inside the palette, or its details button, opens a pane beside the list that says what the highlighted row does, its shortcut, and why it can’t run right now, if it can’t.

On macOS, ⌘ replaces Ctrl throughout — except dictation. Every shortcut in the table is rebindable; see Keyboard shortcuts for the full list and why the app-level chords are three keys rather than two.

Copy and paste

Selecting text and pressing Ctrl+C copies it. With nothing selected, the same key sends the interrupt to the running program, as it should. This is the behavior Windows Terminal uses. Ctrl+Shift+C copies unconditionally.

Paste is Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V or Shift+Insert. What a right-click does is up to Settings → Terminal → Right-click in a terminal. The default, Automatic, opens a menu on macOS — Copy, Paste, Select all, Clear and Find — and on Windows copies the selection if there is one and pastes if there is not. Either behavior can be chosen on any platform. A right-click never copies and pastes at once.

A program that reads the mouse, such as full-screen Claude Code, Codex, vim or tmux, gets the right-click itself. Hold Shift (Option on macOS) to take it back for TermHQ. In such a program, Shift+drag makes TermHQ’s own selection, and it stays up while you move the pointer. Shift+right-click, Ctrl+Shift+C or Ctrl+C copies it.

A program can also put text on the clipboard itself, as Claude Code does beside its own copy (the terminal sequence called OSC 52); TermHQ takes it, and never lets a program read the clipboard.

Ordinary pastes go straight in, and copying shows no receipt. A paste over 5 KiB asks first, showing its size with Cancel and Paste anyway: some terminal programs take time to process a large amount of text. Don’t ask again explains the change before Turn off and paste disables this warning. You can also change Settings → Terminal → Warn before large pastes at any time.

Confirm multi-line pastes is a separate setting, off by default. Turn it on to review multi-line text before it goes to the program. Neither paste question applies to dictation.

Dropping a file onto a terminal types its path at the prompt, quoted the way that shell reads quotes. Files can come from your file manager or from the Files panel. Dropped on an editor pane, a file opens there instead; a browser pane, an SSH pane or a terminal whose shell has ended refuses the drop and says why.

Links

A web address in a terminal’s output opens with Ctrl+click (⌘+click on macOS), in your default browser. Add Shift to open it in a browser pane beside the terminal instead. A plain click only focuses the pane, so a link an agent printed never opens by accident.

The file links a program prints, such as the paths Claude Code and Codex show, open the same way. Ctrl+click (⌘+click on macOS) opens a file in its default app and a folder in your file manager. Add Shift to show a file there instead. A program or script is never run, only shown. The hint beside the pointer says where the link really leads.