Quick terminal

The quick terminal is a small floating terminal you can open over any app while Jelly is running. Run a git pull, check a port, start a build, then get back to what you were doing without switching windows.

Open it

Press ⌃Space from anywhere. The panel appears at the bottom centre of the screen your mouse is on. Jelly’s own windows stay where they are.

Press ⌃Space again, Esc at the prompt, ⌘W, or click outside to hide it.

It’s your shell

The quick terminal runs the same shell as your panes: fish, zsh, bash, or whatever shell.program is set to. Your prompt, completions, autosuggestions, history and aliases all work, because your shell is doing the work. Full-screen programs such as htop and vim work too.

It starts in your home folder. The badge in the header shows the shell’s current folder and follows every cd.

The panel starts as a single prompt line and grows upward as output arrives, up to 16 rows, then scrolls like any terminal. clear or ⌘K shrinks it back.

It keeps running

Hiding the panel doesn’t stop anything. A build or a server keeps running, and it’s all still there the next time you press ⌃Space. Type exit to end the shell; the next ⌃Space starts a fresh one.

Move it into a tab

Press ⌘↩ to move the shell into a new tab of the main window. It’s the same shell, so its history, its folder and anything running in it carry on. The next ⌃Space starts a new quick terminal.

Keys

Action	Keys
Show or hide	⌃Space
Hide (at the prompt)	Esc or ⌘W
Open in a Jelly tab	⌘↩
Clear	⌘K
Copy / paste	⌘C / ⌘V

While a program is running, Esc goes to the program, so it works in vim and less.

Change the shortcut

Open Settings → General → Quick Terminal to turn it off or record a different shortcut. You can also set it in jelly.toml:

[settings.quick-terminal]
enabled = true
hotkey = "ctrl+space"

Use "none" to turn off the shortcut.

Heads up: if you have more than one keyboard input source, macOS uses ⌃Space to switch between them and gets the key before Jelly does. Pick another shortcut, such as "cmd+shift+space", or change the macOS one in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Input Sources.