Use the embedded terminal

When to read this. You want to stop alt-tabbing out to a separate terminal window while you work — or you tried the >_ button in the header, opened the pane once, and couldn't find half the features.

The embedded terminal is a real PTY over a WebSocket. bash (or your configured shell) runs server-side; xterm.js (vendored under /vendor/xterm/, no CDN dependency) renders client-side.

Opening the pane

Two ways:

• Click the >_ icon in the dashboard header.
• Press the configured toggle shortcut. Default is Ctrl+`; change it under terminal.shortcut in preferences.yml.

The pane pushes the dashboard up — it does not overlay. Toggling the pane closed suspends rendering but keeps every tab's PTY alive and its scrollback intact.

Two sides, many tabs

The pane is split into a left side and a right side, each of which can host any number of tabs. Both sides are always visible when the pane is open (the split collapses automatically if a side is empty).

Each side has three buttons in its header:

• + — spawn a new tab running the configured shell.
• Launcher + (if terminal.launcher_command is set) — spawn a new tab whose child process is the launcher command instead of the shell. Default is claude, so this slot opens a Claude Code session. Set launcher_command = "" to hide the button.
• Tab strip — click to focus; middle-click to close.

Each tab is labelled with its child's argv[0] (e.g. bash 1, claude 2). The cwd starts at wherever condash was launched from; subsequent cd is your responsibility. TERM=xterm-256color, and the shell is launched with -l so your login rc-files run.

Moving tabs between sides

Keyboard shortcuts move the active tab left or right:

Action	Default shortcut	Config key
Move active tab to left side	Ctrl+Left	terminal.move_tab_left_shortcut
Move active tab to right side	Ctrl+Right	terminal.move_tab_right_shortcut

The shortcut syntax follows the HTML KeyboardEvent.key convention: Ctrl+Shift+X, Alt+1, etc. Modifiers allowed: Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Meta.

Use this to pair a build terminal on one side with a log-tail on the other without leaving the keyboard.

Screenshot-paste

This is the feature nobody discovers on their own. It solves one specific problem: "I just took a screenshot; now I want its path in my terminal to cat, mv, gh pr comment --body-file, or whatever."

Press Ctrl+Shift+V (configurable as terminal.screenshot_paste_shortcut) anywhere in the dashboard. condash:

1. Looks up terminal.screenshot_dir (default: $XDG_PICTURES_DIR/Screenshots on Linux, ~/Desktop on macOS).
2. Finds the newest image file there.
3. Inserts its absolute path at the active tab's prompt — no Enter appended; you confirm.

Typical use: take a screenshot of a failing test → Ctrl+Shift+V → the path appears → prefix with cat or drop into a gh issue create --body-file command.

Clipboard-based paste (Ctrl+V) also works for regular text, and uses the OS clipboard via a server-side bridge because xterm.js can't read the browser clipboard directly. Both Ctrl+V (paste) and Ctrl+C (copy) flow through this bridge.

Configuration surface

Everything lives under terminal: in <conception_path>/config/preferences.yml:

terminal:
  shell: /bin/zsh
  shortcut: "Ctrl+`"
  screenshot_dir: /home/you/Pictures/Screenshots
  screenshot_paste_shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+V
  launcher_command: claude
  move_tab_left_shortcut: Ctrl+Left
  move_tab_right_shortcut: Ctrl+Right

See the config reference for the full key table with defaults.

Editing shortcuts via the gear modal

The gear modal's Preferences tab has form fields for every [terminal] key:

Saves go to preferences.yml. The shortcut field shows a live "press the combination" capture when you click into it — less error-prone than hand-typing KeyboardEvent.key names.

Platform note

The terminal is Linux and macOS only. On Windows the pane opens with a "terminal only supported on Linux/macOS" error message — PTY support through WSL is on the backlog, not shipped.