Terminal

The Terminal tab is a real shell — the same shell you would open anywhere else — running your AI coding tool inside Operon. You drive Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, or Aider from here exactly as you would in your own terminal. Nothing about the tool changes; Operon simply captures everything it does while you work.

Open a session and the Terminal tab is where you type. As the agent runs, its output scrolls here in real time, and in the background Operon builds the trace, tracks cost, and watches your files. You never lose your usual command-line workflow — you gain instruments around it.

It survives, and it stays mounted

The terminal is backed by a persistent background daemon that runs outside the Operon window. That has two practical consequences you will feel immediately.

• It survives app restarts. If you quit and reopen Operon — or if the app crashes — your shell and its running agent are still there when you come back. The daemon kept them alive.
• It stays mounted when you switch tabs. Jump to Activity, Timeline, or Changes and back, and the terminal is exactly where you left it. Switching views hides it rather than tearing it down, so long-running output is never interrupted or garbled.

Split panes

You can split the terminal into multiple panes to run several shells at once — for example, one driving your agent and another running your dev server or tests. Each split spawns a fresh shell.

1. 1

   Focus the pane you want to split

   Click into the terminal pane you want to divide. The focused pane is the one your next split acts on.

2. 2

   Split to the right

   Press Cmd+D (Ctrl+D on Windows and Linux) to split the pane horizontally, placing a new shell beside the current one.

3. 3

   Split downward

   Press Cmd+Shift+D (Ctrl+Shift+D) to split the pane vertically, placing the new shell below the current one.

4. 4

   Move between panes

   Click a pane to focus it, or use the pane header controls. Each pane keeps its own independent shell and scrollback.

5. 5

   Close a pane

   Press Cmd+W (Ctrl+W) to hide the focused pane. The shell keeps running in the background — closing a pane is non-destructive, so you can bring the work back.

Clickable file paths

When a file path appears in the terminal — in a diff, a stack trace, a compiler error, or a test failure — Operon turns it into a link. Hold Ctrl (or Cmd on macOS) and click the path to open that file. It recognizes the common formats you see every day.

Dev-server links

When your agent or a script starts a local dev server, the localhost URL it prints becomes clickable. Operon detects the common loopback addresses — http://localhost:3000, http://127.0.0.1:5173, and similar — so you can open your running app in a click rather than copying the URL out by hand.

If you would rather keep the preview inside Operon, the Preview tab can render a detected dev server in an embedded browser pane so you never leave the app to check your work.

Replaying a past session

When you open a historical session — one that has already ended — the terminal loads in a read-only mode and replays that session’s recorded shell history. You see what actually scrolled by at the time, exactly as it happened, without any live shell attached. This lets you review an old run’s terminal output alongside its trace and timeline.

Terminal shortcuts

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