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Terminals

Native shell access — standalone or wired into your workflows.

Open a real terminal inside Circuitry and run commands the way you would in any shell. Use it on its own as an interactive session, or drop a Terminal node into a workflow to automate commands as part of a pipeline.

Interactive terminals

  • Real shell — bash, zsh, PowerShell, or cmd, running natively via Circuit.
  • Persistent sessions that survive page reloads.
  • Command history with arrow-key navigation.
  • Multiple terminals open side by side.

Run git operations, manage files, start dev servers, kick off builds, or deploy — without leaving the studio.

Paste images into a terminal

Command-line coding assistants like Claude Code, Gemini, and Codex can take a picture as part of your prompt — a screenshot of a bug, a design reference, a diagram. You can hand one to the terminal three ways:

  • Paste — copy an image, then press Ctrl+V on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux. (The usual paste shortcut still pastes text.)
  • Drag and drop — drop an image file straight onto the terminal.
  • Right-click → Paste image.

The image is handed to the session and the assistant picks it up with your next message. A thin bar along the top edge shows the transfer while it happens.

Terminal nodes in workflows

A Terminal node runs a command as a step in a workflow. Combine it with other nodes to:

  • run a build or test command and branch on the result,
  • shell out to a CLI an agent can't reach directly,
  • automate deployments triggered by a webhook.

On iPad

Drive a terminal on your desktop from an iPad — the command runs on your main machine over Circuit while you watch the output on the tablet. See iPad, powered by your machine.

Requirements

Native shell access needs a connected Circuit (or the desktop app). The server is what executes commands on the host machine.

Typing over a slow connection

When you're driving a terminal on another machine — a laptop from a phone, a desktop from the other side of the country — every character you type waits for a round trip before it appears. That reads as the terminal being broken rather than the link being slow.

Circuitry draws each character as you type it, immediately, and quietly replaces it with the real one when it arrives. Three things keep it honest:

  • It only does this when the delay is actually noticeable. On your own network the echo arrives before the next repaint, so it never draws at all.
  • It only does it where a keystroke reliably appears at the cursor — at a shell prompt or an agent's input box, never inside vim, less or a full-screen TUI, and never while a command is running.
  • If it guesses wrong too often — some shells rewrite the whole line as you type — it switches itself off for the session rather than flickering at you.

Turn it off in Settings → Terminal → Show typing instantly if you'd rather see only what the machine has actually confirmed.

Reading the output

Terminal output is often the thing you actually want: a URL to open, an error to quote, a filename to paste back into a prompt. Switch on Vim keys — from the terminal's right-click or long-press menu — and Esc puts the terminal into a navigation mode where you can search the scrollback with /, select and copy with y, and open links with gx, without a mouse. On a phone it turns each of those from a careful drag into a couple of taps. See Vim Mode.

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