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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). After three unexpected shutdowns in a row, Atrium asks before restoring panes instead of restoring them blindly, 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); set its working directory, open its History, or Stop it without closing.
  • 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 — right-click a worktree to spawn lazygit in that worktree (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”