Integrated Terminal

Built-in terminal emulator with advanced scrollback, keyboard capture, and persistence features

Fresh includes a powerful built-in terminal emulator that seamlessly integrates with your editing workflow.

Opening a Terminal

1. Via Command Palette

   Press Ctrl+P and search for “Open Terminal”

2. Multiple Terminals

   You can open multiple terminal tabs and switch between them like regular file buffers

Terminal Modes

The terminal has two modes, indicated in the status bar:

Terminal Mode

Status bar shows: Terminal

Your keyboard input goes directly to the shell. This is the default mode for interacting with the terminal.

Scrollback Mode

Status bar shows: Terminal (read only)

The terminal output becomes a read-only buffer that you can scroll through, search, and copy text from.

Switching Between Modes

Toggle between terminal mode and scrollback mode:

Primary Toggle

Ctrl+Space   Toggle between terminal and scrollback mode

Keyboard Capture

By default, most editor keybindings (like Ctrl+P for command palette) still work in terminal mode. If you need to send these keys to the terminal instead:

1. Enable Keyboard Capture

   Press F9 to toggle keyboard capture mode

2. Captured Mode Behavior

   When keyboard capture is enabled:

   • Status bar shows “Terminal [capture]”
   • All keys except F9 are sent to the terminal
   • The UI dims (menu bar, status bar, other splits) to clearly show focus is exclusively on the terminal
3. Disable Capture

   Press F9 again to return to normal terminal mode

In keyboard capture mode, all editor shortcuts are disabled except F9. This ensures commands like Ctrl+C are sent to the terminal process instead of the editor.

Scrollback Navigation

In scrollback mode, you can use standard editor navigation:

Key	Action
Arrow keys / Page Up / Page Down	Scroll through output
Ctrl+Home	Jump to the beginning of scrollback history
Ctrl+End	Jump to the end
Ctrl+F	Search through terminal output

Tips and Features

Workspace Persistence

Terminal scrollback is preserved across editor restarts, but running processes are terminated.

Session Persistence (Experimental)

Use fresh -a to start in session mode, then detach with Ctrl+Shift+D to keep terminal processes running in the background. Reattach with fresh -a.

See Session Persistence for details.

Automatic Scroll

When new output arrives while you’re in scrollback mode, the terminal automatically returns to terminal mode to show the latest output.

Disable this behavior with the terminal.jump_to_end_on_output config option.

Automatic Resizing

The terminal automatically resizes when you resize the editor or split panes.

Windows Support

Fresh supports full terminal emulation on Windows 10 (1809+) via ConPTY.

• PowerShell is preferred over cmd.exe
• Stdin piping works: type file | fresh