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

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 header and the same moves as a terminal.

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.

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.

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, 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 with nothing typed it leads with what you ran recently.

On macOS, ⌘ replaces Ctrl throughout — except dictation. Every one of these 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.

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.