Termspace

A terminal workspace on a horizontal canvas.

한국어

Termspace lays terminal panes out on a canvas wider than your screen. Panes that slide off the edge are still there, just to the side. Move focus and the view glides over with it.

Shrinking the window never shrinks a pane. A narrow screen shows less of the canvas; it does not squeeze your editor, logs, and shells into thinner boxes.

The layout is a file. Shape a workspace by hand, save it as YAML, and it comes back exactly the same tomorrow — same columns, same widths, same commands running in the same directories.

Everything is one key away. Alt + arrows moves focus, Alt + M shows the whole canvas, and holding Alt names every pane on screen. No prefix key, no mouse required.

Useful when you work on a laptop screen that a real layout doesn't fit, keep several projects open at once, or run long jobs and agents that finish while you're looking somewhere else.

Linux and macOS. Windows is not supported.

Features

Feature	What it does
Move focus with Alt / Cmd + arrows	The pane in that direction takes focus and the canvas scrolls to it. No prefix key, and no window numbers to remember.
Columns have fixed pixel widths	A column is a number of pixels, not a share of the window. Resizing the window changes how much of the canvas you can see, not how wide anything is.
Overview of the whole session (Alt + M / Cmd+Shift+M)	The entire canvas shrunk to one screen, each card showing the pane's title and what it is running. Arrow keys or a click jump to a pane, and F2 renames the selected card.
Save the current layout as a session	Split panes, cd each shell, start the commands, then save. Column widths, pane ratios, each shell's working directory, and the running commands are written to a new YAML file.
Sessions are YAML files	One file per session in ~/.config/termspace/sessions/. The app reads them and never writes back on its own: splitting or resizing at runtime leaves the file alone. Right-clicking a row in the session list renames it: the name: field is rewritten and the file is renamed to match, keeping the rest of the file as you wrote it.
Reordering the session list	Drag a row up or down to set its place in the list, which is also the order Alt + 1–9 open. The order is kept in ~/.config/termspace/session-order.json, next to the app's settings rather than inside sessions/. A session not yet dragged sorts by when its file was created.
Switching sessions	The wheel over the session list steps through sessions, and Alt + 1–9 opens one directly. Pressing the current session's number again returns to the previous one.
Panning and resizing with the mouse	Mice have no horizontal wheel, so the wheel over the middle of the title bar pans the canvas, as does Shift + wheel anywhere. The gaps between panes are drag handles for resizing.
Notifications from off-screen panes	A pane that rings marks its session in the list. OSC 9 and OSC 777 notifications also reach the desktop, unless you were watching that pane at the time.
Links in output	Ctrl + click (Cmd + click on macOS) opens a URL in the browser. OSC 8 hyperlinks work the same way. A plain click still selects.

Install

Builds are on the releases page. Building from source is in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Linux

Grab the AppImage:

chmod +x Termspace-*.AppImage
./Termspace-*.AppImage

It exits immediately with a sandbox error

Ubuntu 24.04+ ships an AppArmor policy blocking unprivileged user namespaces, which Electron's sandbox needs. --no-sandbox gets you running; registering a profile keeps the sandbox on:

sudo tee /etc/apparmor.d/termspace >/dev/null <<'PROFILE'
abi <abi/4.0>,
include <tunables/global>
profile termspace /home/*/Applications/Termspace.AppImage flags=(unconfined) {
  userns,
  include if exists <local/termspace>
}
PROFILE
sudo apparmor_parser -r /etc/apparmor.d/termspace

Renderer isolation and the CSP are in place either way.

macOS

Download the dmg for your architecture (arm64 for Apple Silicon, x64 for Intel) from the releases page.

First launch. Termspace is ad-hoc code-signed and not notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks the first open — you may see "damaged" or "unverified developer". Both mean the download carries macOS's quarantine flag; the file is intact. Do one of these once:

• Terminal: drag Termspace.app to Applications, then xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Termspace.app
• No terminal: double-click (it will be blocked), then System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway". On macOS 14 and earlier, right-click → Open also works.
• Build from source: npm install && npm run dist:mac — locally built apps carry no quarantine flag.

Sessions

A session is one YAML file. Columns left to right, panes top to bottom:

name: dev
cwd: "~/dev/projects/app"     # unquoted ~ is null in YAML — quote it

columns:
  - width: 720                # px; never shrinks with the window
    panes:
      - title: editor
        command: nvim .
      - title: shell
        height: 0.3           # vertical share within the column

  - width: 900
    panes:
      - title: server
        cwd: ./backend        # relative to the session cwd
        command: uv run fastapi dev

command is typed into the shell, exactly as if you had pressed the keys yourself — it does not replace the shell. So a program that dies leaves you at a working prompt, ready to run it again. Use prefill for a command placed at the prompt but not run.

You don't have to write one by hand: shape the layout in the app and save it (Alt+Shift + S, or ☰ → save current layout). Full reference, including how saving captures running commands: docs/sessions.md.

There is no detach/attach: closing the window ends the processes inside it, and Termspace shows you what will die and asks first. For work that must outlive the window, run tmux inside a pane — Termspace replaces tmux's windows, not tmux itself.

Keys

Linux	macOS	Action
Alt + ←→↑↓	Cmd + ←→↑↓	Move focus
Alt+Shift + ↑ / ↓	Cmd+Shift + ↑ / ↓	Split up / down
Alt+Shift + ← / →	Cmd+Shift + ← / →	New column left / right
Alt+Shift + W	Cmd+Shift + W	Close pane
Alt + U I O P	Cmd + U I O P	Resize — four keys on one row, in vim order
Alt+Shift + U I O P	Cmd+Shift + U I O P	Move the pane itself
Hold Alt	Hold Cmd	Label every pane on screen with its title (can be turned off in settings)
Alt + M	Cmd+Shift+M	Overview of the whole session
F2	F2	Rename the selected pane, in the overview
Alt + S	Cmd + B	Toggle the session sidebar
Alt + G	Cmd + G	Scroll back to the focused pane
Alt + 1–9	Cmd + 1–9	Jump to a session; the same number again bounces back
Alt+Shift + < / >	Cmd+Shift + [ / ]	Previous / next open session
Alt+Shift + S	Cmd + S	Save the layout over the open session's file
Ctrl+Shift + F	Cmd + F	Search the pane's scrollback
Ctrl+Shift + C / V	Cmd + C / V	Copy / paste
Ctrl + + / - / 0	Cmd + + / - / 0	Font size
Ctrl + ,	Cmd + ,	Settings
Shift + wheel	Shift + wheel	Pan the canvas

Everything else goes straight to the focused pane. Every binding is rebindable in Ctrl + ,(⌘Cmd + ,) › Shortcuts.

Settings

Ctrl + ,(⌘Cmd + ,) holds the terminal font and size, interface scale, the language (English / 한국어), mouse and notification behavior, and 19 built-in dark palettes — Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Nord, Tokyo Night, Solarized, Dracula, the Zenbones trio, and the Termspace default. Drop a YAML into ~/.config/termspace/themes/ for your own.

Termspace checks GitHub for a newer release when it starts and once a day: one anonymous request to the releases API, nothing else sent. A newer release shows as a chip in the title bar that opens the release page. updateCheck: 0 in ~/.config/termspace/settings.yaml (or the toggle in Settings › Updates) turns the check off; "Check now" in the same section works either way.

Developing

Setup, the test commands, and the bar for a PR are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

I focus on feature planning and usability; the implementation is done with Claude Code, spec-first, gated by the test suite and the app's own self-check.

License

MIT, including the bundled palettes (notices).