Terminal controls

The terminal gives your writing project a command line. Use it to run an analysis script, inspect generated files, or reproduce a command described in your methods.

Open the terminal from the project toolbar. Session tabs, New terminal (+), and Terminal settings sit directly above the output. Open full screenshot

Open Terminal

Choose Terminal from the workspace dock, or press Ctrl+` (Control and the backtick key, on every platform). On macOS and Linux, View → Toggle Terminal does the same. The terminal opens for the active project. Hiding the terminal lets you return to the editor while the session remains available.

To use a different key, change Toggle terminal in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Select and copy output

Click in the terminal to give it focus. On macOS, ⌘A or Edit → Select All then selects the terminal’s text rather than your manuscript, ready to copy.

New terminal

Use New terminal to open another session. Keep a long-running analysis in one tab and use another for inspecting output.

Switch sessions

Select a terminal tab to see its shell and output. A running command belongs to that session, not whichever editor file is selected.

The tab menu

Right-click a terminal tab, or focus it and press Shift+F10, to open its menu.

Rename

Choose Rename, or double-click the tab’s title, and type a name such as analysis or figures. The purpose of each session stays visible when several are open.

Color

Open Color and pick a swatch to tell sessions apart. Choose None to remove the color.

Close

Open Close and choose one of these. Each one counts from the tab whose menu you opened:

• Close current closes that tab. The × on the tab does the same.
• Close others keeps that tab and closes the rest.
• Close all to the left closes the tabs before it.
• Close all to the right closes the tabs after it.

An item is greyed out when there is nothing for it to close.

Closing a tab ends its terminal session, so check for commands you still need first. To come back to a running command later, hide the terminal panel instead.

Terminal settings

Settings → Appearance → Terminal. Use this tab for fonts, cursor, color palette, and automatic shell startup. Open full screenshot

Open Terminal settings to adjust the terminal’s font, size, normal and bold weights, cursor shape, cursor blink, startup behavior, and colors. The Appearance guide describes these controls individually.

Start with a project

Enable the terminal startup option in Appearance settings if you want it ready when a project opens. Otherwise, open it from the dock when you need a shell.

Inspect the LLaMA project

Open the LLaMA project and its terminal. This command counts the top-level LaTeX source files and checks that acl2023.tex exists. It reads the project without changing it:

python3 -c 'from pathlib import Path; files = sorted(Path(".").glob("*.tex")); print("LaTeX source files:", len(files)); print("Main file:", Path("acl2023.tex").is_file())'

The count depends on your copy of the project. Main file: True confirms the entry file is present. On systems where Python is installed as python, use that command instead.

For an analysis script, keep the script and its input data together in the project, run it from this terminal, and insert its output into the paper only after checking the results.

Build a paper around data analysis →