Introduction

Jelly is a terminal made for the Mac. It looks like it belongs on macOS 26, with Liquid Glass chrome and a crisp, GPU-rendered terminal, and it keeps your work organised so you are never hunting through a pile of unnamed windows.

Preview software. Everything before v1 is a preview. Config keys and behaviour can change between versions.

What makes it different

• Sessions. Named workspaces such as Work or Personal. Each one holds its own tabs and split panes.
• A quick terminal from any app. ⌃Space opens your shell in a floating panel over whatever you’re doing. See Quick terminal.
• A file explorer and viewer built in. See what is changing on disk while an agent works, and read Markdown without leaving the terminal.
• Plain-text configuration. One jelly.toml for settings, keybinds and themes.
• Your shell, unchanged. fish, zsh, bash, nu, starship, powerlevel10k, Nerd Fonts, ligatures and emoji all render as they do in Ghostty or iTerm2.

Easy to miss

Some features have no button and no menu item to tell you they exist.

Try	What happens
⌘E	A live file tree that follows your shell. File explorer
Type in the explorer	Files filter as you type, no search box needed. Search files
⌘⇧M	Preview Markdown and code over your panes. File viewer
Drop a .toml on the window	Import themes and settings with a preview. Import by drop

The window

┌────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ● ● ●    ◐ │ [dev ×] [server] [db] [logs]  +            ⌕ │  tab bar
│            ├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Sessions + │                                              │
│  ▸ Work    │                 pane                         │
│    Personal│                                              │
│    ...     ├────────────────────────┬─────────────────────┤
│            │ ⌁ zsh           ⑂ ⤢   │ ⌁ logs              │  pane headers
│            │                        │                     │
│            │                        │                     │
│            │                ◉ dev · 3 panes · 112×28      │  status bar
└────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Area	What it does
Sidebar	Sessions. Toggle it with ⌘0.
Tab bar	One tab per workspace view. + opens a tab, ⌕ opens search.
Panes	Detached rounded cards you can split as deep as you like.
Status bar	Session name, tab count, pane count, and the grid size of the focused pane.
Explorer	A file tree on the right, opened with ⌘E.

Where to go next

• New here? Follow the Quick start.
• Want the features nobody tells you about? Read File explorer and Search files.
• Looking for a key? See Keyboard shortcuts.