A shell that follows you around.
Backtick toggles a terminal at the bottom of the window. It auto-cd’s to the active pane on every navigation — your shell is always where you are.
Opening the terminal
Press ` (backtick) to slide a shell up from the bottom of the window. Drag the divider to resize. Press the same key again to hide it. Captain’s Deck remembers whether you had it open and brings it back on next launch.
Auto cd on navigation
This is the marquee feature. Every time you change directory in the active pane, Captain’s Deck sends a cd to your shell. Walk the panel; the shell follows. It works the other way too — cd in the shell and the active pane navigates with you (via OSC 7 from your shell’s precmd).
Two cases where the auto-cd stays out of your way:
- While a foreground command is running — we don’t inject
cdinto a busy stdin, so you can keep navigating the panes while a build runs without it scrambling. - When the active pane is on a remote provider (SFTP, S3, …). The shell is always local, so a remote path like
/var/wwwwould point somewhere different on your Mac.
Toggle the sync globally with the Sync button in the terminal’s header bar.
Per-tab sessions
Each pane tab gets its own shell. Switch tabs and the terminal swaps to that tab’s session — same scrollback, same working directory, same running processes. Close the tab and its shell goes with it.
On by default. If you’d rather have one shared shell across all tabs, untick Per-tab terminal sessions in Settings → General. The change applies on next app launch (swapping mid-session would orphan PTYs).
Your shell
Captain’s Deck respects $SHELL — zsh by default on modern macOS, bash on older systems, whatever you set otherwise. Your existing dotfiles (.zshrc, .bashrc, .config/fish/config.fish, …) load as a normal interactive login shell. Aliases, prompt, environment, all there.
Font size
Resize terminal text without leaving the window:
- Cmd+Option+= — bigger
- Cmd+Option+- — smaller
The terminal font family lives in Settings → Appearance → Terminal font.
Colors & cursor
Settings → Appearance dresses the terminal to taste. Everything here applies to open terminals the moment you change it.
Color scheme
Pick from five built-in palettes: Classic Green, Solarized Dark, Nord, Dracula, and Tomorrow Night.
Cursor
- Cursor style — Block, Underline, or Bar (I-beam).
- Blink cursor — a checkbox to make the cursor pulse.
Import from Terminal…
Already have colors you love in Terminal.app? Click Import from Terminal… and point it at a macOS .terminal profile — Captain’s Deck reads the palette and applies it to the embedded terminal.