Terminal

A terminal pane is a shell, or any command, running in a split beside your code. Test runners, build tasks, tools like htop, and AI coding sessions all use the same kind of pane.

Built on libghostty

mnml does not have its own terminal emulator. The part of a terminal that reads a program's output and keeps the screen — parsing escape sequences, the grid of cells, scrollback, modes, selection, hyperlinks, prompt marks — is libghostty: the core of Ghostty, which Ghostty's authors describe as a cross-platform library that "provides the core terminal emulation". mnml uses its ghostty-vt Zig module directly, pinned to a Ghostty commit in build.zig.zon, and paints each pane from that grid in its own chrome.

The reason is fidelity. A terminal emulator that handles everything real programs send is a project in itself; libghostty is that project, and a program in an mnml pane gets the same emulation it would get in Ghostty. Because mnml is also written in Zig, it uses the module as a plain Zig dependency, with no C layer in between. (mnml uses only the emulation; the drawing is mnml's own, inside whatever terminal you run it in.)

What that gives a program in a pane

Everything below is handled by the pane today:

• Colour. Palette and 24-bit RGB colours, underline styles and underline colours. The child sees COLORTERM=truecolor, and TERM=xterm-ghostty when Ghostty's terminfo is installed (xterm-256color otherwise).
• The mouse. Programs that ask for mouse reporting get it, in the normal and SGR encodings. Hold Shift to select text yourself instead.
• The Kitty keyboard protocol, for programs that turn it on. A program that turns on both it and application cursor keys gets the arrows, Home and End as CSI sequences, as Ghostty sends them.
• Bracketed paste, with the pasted text cleaned so it cannot close the bracket early.
• Hyperlinks (OSC 8), window titles (OSC 0/2), and the clipboard: a program can write to your clipboard (OSC 52, and Kitty's clipboard protocol) but never read it. Turn writes off with terminal.osc52 = false.
• Grapheme clustering, so multi-codepoint characters take the right number of cells.
• Device attribute queries are answered, which some shells wait for at start-up.

Shell integration

In a plain shell pane, mnml loads a small integration for zsh, bash and fish without touching your dotfiles. It marks each prompt (OSC 133) and reports the working directory (OSC 7). With the marks in place, term.prev_prompt and term.next_prompt jump between commands, and a resize redraws the prompt cleanly. Turn it off with terminal.shell_integration = false. It applies on macOS and Linux.

Opening a terminal

In the standard profile, the space … chords are reached through ctrl+k, which opens the same which-key menu.

The :term command runs anything:

:term
:term htop
:term cargo watch -x test

With no argument it opens your login shell; with one, it runs the line through the shell (sh -c, or cmd /d /c on Windows) in a pane named after the command. In the vim profile it opens as a new tab; in the standard profile, in a split below.

Scrollback and search

Scrollback keeps terminal.scrollback_lines lines (10,000 by default). Shift+PageUp / PageDown / Home / End move through it, and the mouse wheel scrolls it when the program has not asked for the wheel.

The scrollback has a scrollbar over the pane's rightmost column. It shows while you are scrolled back from the bottom, or while the pointer is on that column (unless the program has taken the mouse). Drag the thumb through the history, or click the track above or below it to page a screenful. The bar is painted over the program's last column rather than beside it, so the program's size never changes when the bar comes or goes. A full-screen program — an editor, htop — runs on the alternate screen, which keeps no history, so it never shows the bar.

term.search searches the scrollback — plain text with smart case, or a regular expression. In the standard profile, ctrl+f in a terminal pane opens it; n and N step through matches.

Selecting and copying

Drag to select. Double-click selects a word and triple-click a line. When the program has taken the mouse, hold Shift for any of these.

With copy on select on — the default — releasing the button copies the selection to the clipboard, and so does a double- or triple-click. Turn it off with the Terminal copy on select row in the settings overlay, or in config.zon:

.{ .ui = .{ .copy_on_select = false } }

Off, a drag only selects, and you copy with ctrl+c.

The copy keys, in both profiles:

ctrl+d, ctrl+z and ctrl+l always go to the program.

In the vim profile, ctrl+\ ctrl+n puts the pane in terminal-normal mode, where the keys go to mnml instead of the program: / searches, y yanks the selection, the ctrl+w window keys work, ]a / [a step to the next or previous AI session, and i or a hands the keyboard back.

Pasting

ctrl+shift+v and shift+insert paste the clipboard into the pane, in both profiles. Plain ctrl+v stays the program's — Claude Code uses it to paste an image. A paste goes in as bracketed paste when the program has asked for it.

Links

URLs in a pane's output are links — a plain https://… as well as a hyperlink the program printed (OSC 8) — and so are ticket keys and pull-request references, by the patterns your installed integrations declare (a manifest's links[], in the SDK reference). With no integration declaring one, only URLs link. A link wears a dotted underline and lights under the pointer.

• ctrl+click or cmd+click opens it in the browser. A plain press still starts a selection.
• A right-click on it opens a menu with Copy link and Open link above Copy. While that menu is open the link stays lit in the accent with a solid underline, so you can see which link the rows are for.

A line is matched once it has held still for a frame, so a flood of output costs nothing extra; a URL soft-wrapped over two rows links whole on both.

Links

URLs in a pane's output, and the ticket keys and pull-request references your integrations declare, wear a dotted underline and light under the pointer. Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on macOS) opens one; a plain press still starts a selection. Right-click a link for Copy link and Open link. See Links.

Windows

On Windows, panes use the system's ConPTY. The Windows build compiles on every change but has not yet been run end to end, so expect rough edges there; docs/WINDOWS.md keeps the honest list.

Configuration

The terminal keys — scrollback, shell integration, clipboard writes and the rest — and ui.copy_on_select are in the configuration reference.

Next

• Menus, Tabs and Fields — the right-click menus, tab strips and scrollbars a terminal pane shares with the rest of mnml.
• AI sessions — Claude Code and Codex in terminal panes.
• The API — what a program in a pane may ask mnml to do.