DocsWorking with projects

Project Terminal

The project view's Terminal tab opens plain shell terminals rooted in the project's root directory — the folder you registered as the project, its primary checkout — kept running in the background so a dev server, watcher, or build you start here keeps going wherever you navigate. Throughout this page is Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Windows and Linux.

Open the Terminal tab

Click a project row in the left sidebar to open the project view, then pick the Terminal tab — or press ⌘3 from anywhere in the project view. It's the third tab, alongside Dashboard (⌘1) and Git (⌘2):

⌘1Switch to the Dashboard tab
⌘2Switch to the Git tab
⌘3Switch to the Terminal tab

The first shell spawns automatically the moment you open the tab. These bindings share their default combos with the session tab shortcuts — a session and a project are never in view at the same time, so they don't conflict, and each is rebindable on its own. Plexus remembers which tab you left open per project.

Run multiple terminals

The tab is a tab strip, so you can keep several shells open at once — each an independent login shell with its own scrollback, started in the project root:

  • Click + to add a new terminal.
  • Double-click a tab to rename it inline.
  • Click the × on a tab to close that shell.

Use them for whatever runs at the repository root: start the dev server, run a file watcher, kick off a build, or tail logs while your sessions work in their own worktrees. Which shell Plexus spawns follows the global terminal.shell setting — see Choose which shell to run.

Keep-warm behavior

These terminals belong to the project, not to any one tab or session. Switching tabs, opening a session, or moving to another project leaves them running in the background — nothing in flight is interrupted, and returning to the Terminal tab re-attaches you to the full scrollback. That makes the project Terminal the right home for a long-running root process like a dev server, watcher, or build.

They're only torn down when the project itself is deleted or archived — closing the project view or navigating away never kills them.

means Cmd on macOS and Ctrl on Windows/Linux. Rebind the tab shortcut under Keybindings in Settings; see Keyboard shortcuts. For a shell scoped to a single session's worktree instead of the project root, see the session Terminal.