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Atrium Atrium

Panes & terminals

Every pane is a real terminal (xterm.js with GPU rendering, driven by a native PTY). This page covers what a pane can do beyond “be a terminal.”

Three kinds of pane

Section titled “Three kinds of pane”
  • Terminal — a bare interactive shell in the project’s connection (WSL2/PowerShell/Git Bash/cmd on Windows; zsh/bash/fish on macOS).
  • Agent — a shell that launches an agent command (claude, codex, …). Agent panes get provider powers — session resume, context-% — described in Agents in Atrium.
  • Command — runs one program (a dev server, a build, a script) and shows exited when it ends. Atrium auto-detects scripts to offer as one-click command templates. Every pane has a Restart button; agents get a confirm first.

Sessions that survive restarts

Section titled “Sessions that survive restarts”

Closing Atrium never loses a pane. Panes persist as dormant, click-to-wake skeletons — the process isn’t respawned until you wake it, so launching Atrium never auto-runs anything. Scrollback is saved on close and replayed size-first (the terminal takes its size before history is written back, so nothing rewraps or tears). A crash-loop guard stops a repeatedly-dying command from burning CPU, and respawns preserve the pane’s live working directory rather than resetting to the project root.

Working with panes

Section titled “Working with panes”
  • Scrollback search — Ctrl+Shift+/ (⌘⇧/) opens find-in-scrollback.
  • Pin a pane to the top of its group; move it to another group; rename it (otherwise the title derives from its folder + kind).
  • Right-click pastes (terminal convention), and app chrome is never text-selectable. On macOS, copy/paste in a pane is ⌘⇧C / ⌘V.
  • Paste a screenshot — Ctrl+V with an image on the clipboard writes a temp PNG and pastes its (shell-translated) path into the pane. Agents read the image natively; great for “here’s the bug.”
  • Clickable links — URLs in terminal output open in your browser.
  • Live context per pane — the current working directory (worktree-aware), the git branch, and the pane’s memory usage (including processes inside WSL) are shown live.
  • Open lazygit here — one click spawns lazygit scoped to the pane’s live directory (if installed). See Git tools.

Script detection

Section titled “Script detection”

Atrium reads your project’s package.json scripts (picking bun/pnpm/yarn/npm from the lockfile), Makefile targets, and justfile recipes, and offers them as one-click command templates. Detection only suggests — nothing runs until you click.

Appearance

Section titled “Appearance”
  • Terminal font — family and size are configurable (Settings → Appearance); a Nerd Font (CaskaydiaCove Mono) is bundled as the default, so agent TUIs and prompt glyphs render correctly out of the box.
  • App zoom — Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 (⌘ on macOS) zooms the whole app; terminals re-fit, and the level persists.
  • Themes — six presets with a glow-intensity control; see Settings & configuration.

Next

Section titled “Next”