Local Terminals
Fast, full-color local terminals on a real PTY, with your login shell and your environment.
New Terminal (⌘T, or the app menu) opens a terminal on this Mac in a tab. It runs the user's own shell as a login shell on a real pseudo-terminal. PATH, aliases and prompt are the same as in any other terminal, even when the app was opened from Finder.
The emulator is xterm-compatible: 256 colors and true color, the mouse, bracketed paste and the alternate screen, so programs like vim, htop, tmux and Claude Code run as they should. Each terminal gets a number in its tab until the shell sets a title of its own.
Terminals split: Split Right or Split Down opens another terminal in the same folder. With the Terminal Sessions setting on (the default), a tab closes when its shell exits.
Font family, size, line height, cursor shape and scrollback are settings that apply to terminals already open. Ten monospaced families are bundled.
What it does
- Real PTY, login shell, UTF-8 and true color.
- Split into more terminals in the same folder.
- Clickable links and file paths in the output.
- Ten bundled monospaced fonts; size, line height, cursor and scrollback settings.
- Grid size (columns × rows) shown in the status bar.
How it behaves
- The environment variables that other terminals or a Claude Code session set are left out, so sessions started here are independent.
- Shortcuts of the app (⌘T, ⌘N, ⌘O, ⌘W, ⌘E, ⌘, , ⌘Q) work even while a terminal has the keyboard.
Why it matters
- A real terminal first: the IDE layout is around it, not instead of it.