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Terminals and editors

Opening an environment in the desktop is opening it in your editor of choice, backed by terminals that keep running even while you're looking elsewhere.

Persistent terminal sessions​

Each environment owns its own terminals, and switching tabs doesn't kill them. For an environment backed by a runtime pod, the sessions live in the pod and keep running even while the environment is closed — a long-running Agent keeps working while you're away — so reopening reconnects you to the same sessions and scrollback instead of starting fresh ones. Switching between tabs is instant regardless of how long a session has been running or how much it has printed: the desktop keeps a snapshot of each tab's screen and only replays what's arrived since you last looked at it, instead of re-drawing its entire history. A single tab's retained scrollback is capped (the same size xterm itself keeps on screen) so a session that runs for days, or one nobody has looked at in a while, can't grow without bound in memory.

Clickable URLs and file paths​

A URL an Agent or command prints — https://, mailto:, or one wrapped in a terminal hyperlink — opens in your browser on click. A file path opens with your OS's file handler the same way. Where the path points depends on which kind of tab printed it: the Local tab, an orchestrator, and the Contribute shell all run on your own machine, so a path there is a real path on your machine. An environment's own tabs (ERun, AI, and any extra terminal) run inside that environment's pod, so a path there is only opened if it has a real counterpart on your machine — under workspace sync's mirror or its synced outputs folder. A pod path with no synced counterpart is left as plain text rather than guessing; it is never opened against a same-named file that happens to exist on your own machine.

Copying out of a terminal​

Select text in a terminal tab and copy it with your platform's chord — Cmd+C on macOS, Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Shift+C on Windows — and it lands on your machine's clipboard, not the pod's. Ctrl+C stays the interrupt: with nothing selected it always reaches the program in the terminal, and on macOS it does so even when something is selected. Right-clicking copies the selection too, or pastes when there is none. A program running inside the environment can also hand you text directly — an Agent that prints a sign-in URL with a "press c to copy" hint puts it on your clipboard, so you can paste it into the browser on your machine. That direction is one-way by design: nothing inside the environment can read your clipboard back.

  • VS Code or IntelliJ in one click. The IDE attaches to the environment's filesystem — editor, extensions, language servers, debugger, everything sees the same files the Agent sees.
  • Any other editor that supports SSH. Cursor, Zed, JetBrains Gateway, Neovim with remote plugins, anything else — the desktop publishes the local SSH details, point your editor at them.

Where next​