Terminal

Mosaic's terminal is GPU-accelerated with smooth scrolling, crisp text, and responsive rendering even at high scrollback counts. If hardware acceleration is unavailable, Mosaic falls back gracefully to software rendering. Every feature you would expect from a modern terminal is here, along with several you will not find in other terminal emulators.

Find in Terminal

Press Ctrl+F to open the search bar. It supports:

• Next/previous navigation through matches
• Match count displayed in the search bar
• Highlight decorations directly in the terminal buffer so you can see all matches at once

The search works across the entire scrollback buffer, not just the visible viewport.

Vi-Style Copy Mode

Press Ctrl+Shift+E to enter copy mode. Navigate the terminal buffer with keyboard-only controls, without touching the mouse:

Select text visually, then yank to copy it to the clipboard. Press Escape to exit copy mode.

Tip: Copy mode is especially useful when you need to select text from far back in the scrollback buffer, or when you want to search and copy specific output without scrolling.

Font Zoom

Hold Ctrl and scroll the mouse wheel to change the terminal font size. The range is 6px to 32px. The setting is:

• Global across all panes -- every terminal updates simultaneously
• Persisted between sessions -- your preferred size is remembered

Smart Copy and Paste

Copy (Ctrl+C)

Mosaic's copy behavior is context-aware:

• When text is selected: copies the selection to the clipboard
• When nothing is selected: sends SIGINT to the running process (standard terminal behavior)

This means you never need a separate copy shortcut -- Ctrl+C always does the right thing.

Paste (Ctrl+V)

Pastes from the clipboard into the terminal. If the clipboard contains multiple lines, Mosaic shows a warning dialog before pasting. This prevents accidental command execution from pasting multi-line content that could contain newlines interpreted as Enter presses.

Broadcast Mode

Press Ctrl+Shift+B to toggle broadcast mode. Every keystroke you type is sent to all terminals in the current workspace simultaneously.

Use cases:

• Running the same command across multiple servers
• Setting environment variables in all terminals at once
• Synchronized testing across parallel sessions

Broadcast mode is scoped to the active workspace only -- terminals in other workspaces are not affected.

Clickable Links

Mosaic detects and makes several types of text clickable in the terminal:

Tip: MSYS-style paths like /d/projects/foo are automatically converted to Windows paths (D:\projects\foo) for .md file detection.

Font Ligatures

Font ligatures can be toggled in Settings > Appearance. They work with ligature-supporting fonts such as:

• Fira Code -- popular ligatures for =>, !=, >=, ===, and more
• JetBrains Mono -- clean ligatures designed for code readability

Inline Images

Mosaic supports two inline image protocols for displaying images directly in the terminal buffer:

Use any tool that outputs Sixel or iTerm2 escape sequences and the images will appear directly in your terminal.

HTML Export

Export your terminal buffer as styled HTML for sharing. The export preserves colors, formatting, and text exactly as it appears in the terminal. Access this from the pane context menu.

Cursor Settings

Customize cursor appearance in Settings > Behavior & Confirmations:

Both settings persist across restarts and apply to all terminals.

Scrollback Buffer

Configure the scrollback buffer size in settings. The range is 1,000 to 100,000 lines. The new value applies to terminals opened after the change -- existing terminals keep their current buffer size.

Tip: Higher scrollback values use more memory. For most workflows, 10,000 lines is a good balance between history and performance.

Bell Detection

When a bell character fires in an unfocused pane, the tab displays a visual pulse animation. This alerts you to activity in background terminals without switching to them -- useful for build completions, test results, or any tool that rings the bell on finish.

Completion Alerts

When a long-running command finishes in a background pane, Mosaic can notify you in multiple ways:

• OS notification -- a system notification appears with a summary
• Synthesized sound -- choose from 6 built-in presets (chime, ding, soft, complete, alert, success) or provide a custom audio file
• Live minimap preview -- the notification includes a minimap of the terminal output so you can see the result at a glance

Configure sounds, volume, and per-workspace overrides in Settings > Notifications & Alerts. You can also set up external webhook notifications to ntfy, Discord, or Telegram for when you are away from your desk.

Session History

Terminal sessions are automatically saved and restored:

On restore, destructive escape sequences are stripped to prevent re-execution of commands.

Unicode and Emoji Support

Full Unicode rendering is built in. This handles:

• Emoji (including multi-codepoint sequences like flags and skin tones)
• CJK characters (proper double-width rendering)
• Grapheme clusters (combined characters render as single visual units)
• Right-to-left text segments

Working Directory Tracking

When your shell supports it (most modern shells do), it reports the current working directory to Mosaic. This enables:

• Accurate CWD display in the status bar
• New terminals opened from a split inheriting the current directory
• File explorer auto-switching to the active terminal's directory

Scroll Position Restore

Mosaic remembers and restores your scroll position when you switch between panes, contexts, or workspaces. When you return to a terminal, you will be at the same position in the scrollback where you left off.

Additional Terminal Features

Tip: Open Settings > Appearance to explore all visual customization options, including 9 built-in dark themes (Catppuccin Mocha, Dracula, Nord, One Dark, Solarized Dark, Gruvbox Dark, Dark Petrol, Pure Black, Tokyo Night).

Related Pages

• Panes and Tabs -- splitting, zooming, rearranging, and tab management
• Workspaces -- independent environments with their own layouts and settings
• File Viewer -- editor, markdown preview, image viewer, log viewer
• Getting Started -- installation and first steps