Terminals and sessions

Every session is a real terminal running a real program: either Claude Code (claude) or your login shell. spekterm does not wrap or imitate either one — what you type goes to the program, and what it prints is what you see.

Starting sessions

Select a folder on the rail, then click + on the tab bar or press Ctrl+T and choose Run claude or Login shell. The menu works from the keyboard: arrow keys to move, Enter to choose.

A session starts in the folder’s root directory. Sessions on the Global rail item start in your home directory.
claude and your shell get the same environment you would have in your own terminal: spekterm reads your login shell’s environment once at startup. After editing .zshrc or .bashrc, restart spekterm.
If claude is not found, the terminal shows the shell’s error and the tab is marked Exited — it does not fail silently.

Tabs are named after the title the program sets. To use your own name, right-click the tab and choose Rename; while a name is set, the program’s titles are ignored. Clear the name to follow them again.

Working in the terminal

Copy and paste: Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V. Ctrl+C is always an interrupt, even when text is selected, so you can always stop a runaway command.
Links in terminal output open in your browser when you click them.
Switch sessions in the current rail item with Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab; reorder tabs by dragging or with Shift+← / Shift+→.
Close a session with Ctrl+Shift+W or from its tab menu.

spekterm’s shortcuts are chosen so they do not take keys your shell or Claude Code need. The full list, and why each key was chosen, is on the Keyboard shortcuts page.

The look of the terminal — font, size, line height, and GPU drawing — is under Settings; see Settings.

After a restart: dormant sessions

Closing spekterm ends every session’s process. If any are still running, spekterm asks first and lists them. A build, a dev server, or a reply an agent is still writing is lost; spekterm cannot keep processes alive while it is closed.

What it does keep is the session itself. When you open spekterm again, every session is back in its tab, dormant — shown, but with no process. Nothing starts until you ask:

Press Wake, or Enter while the dormant session has focus.
A claude session resumes the same conversation where it left off.
A shell starts again in its last working directory. Its previous screen is shown above a line that reads end of previous content, so you can tell old output from new.

If a conversation cannot be resumed (for example, it was deleted), the session starts a fresh conversation instead of leaving you with a tab that cannot be used.

Hibernation

Sessions you only use now and then do not need to hold a running process. Hibernate a session to end its process and leave it dormant in place — exactly the state a restart produces, woken the same way.

By hand: Ctrl+Shift+H, or Hibernate in the tab’s or the rail row’s menu.
Automatically: a session that has been idle for 24 hours is hibernated. Change the time or turn it off under Settings → Hibernate idle sessions. The session on screen is never hibernated automatically, and neither is an agent that is working or a shell that is running a job.

A hibernated shell loses what only lived in its process: unexported variables, command history not yet saved to disk, and background jobs. The dormant screen says so. A hibernated claude session loses nothing — waking it resumes the conversation.

Sessions in git worktrees

If a repository has linked git worktrees, the side panel shows changes from all of them, labeled with their working directory. When a change lives in another worktree, the side panel offers Open a session there, which starts a claude session in that worktree’s root. The status bar shows which worktree the focused session is in (wt <name>).

Worktrees outside the folder’s directory can still host sessions; only browsing their files in the side panel is limited.

The status bar

Along the bottom, the status bar shows the selected repository, the focused session’s working directory and branch, how many sessions are open, and the anchored change’s task progress. If you turn on Show agent status in the status bar in Settings, claude also reports its model, context usage, and cost there. That setting applies to sessions started after you change it, and your own Claude Code status line keeps working.