Terminal Tour

A real shell, inside the studio. Most work eventually touches a command line — installing dependencies, running builds, inspecting output, steering a coding agent. Circuitry puts that command line one tab away from the documents it operates on: run the build next to the code it compiles, tail a log next to the workflow that produced it, and direct a coding agent while the whiteboard with your plan is still on screen. The terminal is where you direct — the studio's other surfaces are where you think, plan, and review, and the terminal turns those decisions into commands without leaving the room.

Terminals run on your own computer, through the Circuitry desktop app or a Circuit connection — real shell, real filesystem, your actual tools. They're also where coding agents live: open a terminal, hand it to an agent, and watch it work alongside everything else you have open.

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A tour of the controls

A terminal opened from a workflow node shows a slim toolbar. On the left you'll see a glyph, the terminal's name, and a status pill reading Active or Disconnected. On the right:

• / Terminal theme — flips this one terminal between light and dark, independent of the document theme. The choice sticks per terminal and stays in sync with the same toggle on the canvas node.
• Kill Terminal Session — terminates the shell session running on your computer. Shown while a session is active.
• Configure Terminal — opens the terminal's configuration.
• Save ⌘S — saves the workflow this terminal belongs to; the button turns green when there are unsaved changes.

Standalone terminals — ones you open directly rather than from a node — are deliberately chrome-free: no toolbar at all, just the shell, following the document theme.

The debug terminal

When you debug code, a companion terminal opens with its own controls: a status dot with the session name and a Running / Paused / Stopped label on the left, and on the right:

• Continue F5 — resumes a paused debug session.
• Stop — ends the debug session.
• Scroll to bottom — jumps to the newest output and re-engages auto-scroll after you've scrolled up.
• Clear output — clears the debug output buffer.

Drop an image straight into the prompt

Coding agents can read screenshots — so terminals accept them. Paste or drag an image into a terminal and Circuitry saves it to your project's cache and types the file path at the prompt, ready for the agent to open. A slim progress bar sweeps along the top edge while the image transfers, and the terminal's Paste — in the right-click menu, or in the callout a long press raises on a touchscreen — pastes whichever it finds, image or text.

On macOS the image-paste shortcut is CtrlV (plain ⌘V stays ordinary text paste); on Windows and Linux it's Ctrl⇧V. Pasting with the normal text-paste shortcut also works when the clipboard holds an image.

On a touchscreen

On an iPad or a phone a terminal answers to your finger the way text does everywhere else on the device — with a few differences that exist because a terminal is mostly output you read rather than text you edit.

Selecting text

Hold where you want to start, let go, and tap Select in the menu. The word under your finger is selected, with a handle at each end — drag either handle to take in more, and the other end stays where it is. Drag a handle to the top or bottom edge and the output scrolls so you can keep going. Then tap Copy.

While something is selected, nothing moves under it. An agent can keep printing and the text you selected stays exactly where it is on screen, the same way it does when you have scrolled back to read. You can still scroll yourself, and the selection moves with the text — even in a program that normally takes over scrolling, which gets it back once you deselect.

• Tap inside the selection to bring the menu back.
• Tap anywhere else to deselect. A tap just beside the menu does nothing, so a near miss of a button does not throw your selection away.
• Double tap deselects and jumps to the bottom.

The menu also has Select All and Paste — which pastes an image as readily as text — and More…, which opens the terminal's full menu: Select text…, which opens the surrounding output as ordinary text you can select with the device's own handles, and Vim keys.

Links and file paths

Hold on a link or a file path in the output and let go: the menu leads with Open link and Copy link (or Open file and Copy path), ahead of Select.

Sessions live on your computer

The shell session belongs to your machine, not to the browser tab. Close a terminal tab and the session keeps running; the studio's terminals list shows every live session so you can reopen one and pick up exactly where the output left off. Double-click a session in the list to rename it.

Keyboard

Shortcuts use ⌘ on macOS — read it as Ctrl on Windows/Linux, except where a literal Ctrl is written.

⌘T works while the terminal has focus. On the web it can be claimed before Circuitry ever sees it — if nothing happens, put New terminal on a different key in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Works with the rest of the studio

• Terminal nodes — put a live terminal on the workflow canvas itself
• Coding agents — run an agent in a terminal and direct it from the studio
• Circuit — how terminals reach your computer's shell and files
• The agentic IDE — code, agents, and terminals working the same project
• Workflows — the canvas terminals plug into