Terminal

Nana’s terminals run in the server, powered by Ghostty. They keep running after you quit the app, and every app shows the same screen and history.

Tabs and splits

• New panes open in the project folder. Set Settings → Terminal → New pane directory to open them in the current pane’s folder instead.
• Drag dividers to resize, or even them out with Equalize Splits (Ctrl+Alt+=, or a pane’s right-click menu). Win-drag a pane onto another pane to swap them, or onto an edge to dock it there.
• Right-click a tab to rename, color, or pin it. Pinned tabs stay first and can’t be closed until unpinned.

See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list.

Closing and detaching

• Closing a pane ends its terminal, unless another pane in any app still shows it.
• Nana asks first when a program other than the shell is running.
• Detach Terminal in the pane’s right-click menu removes the pane but keeps the terminal running.
• Existing Terminals (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T, or the project menu) lists the project’s terminals that this app isn’t showing, with the app that owns each, and opens one in a new tab.
• Set Settings → General → When closing tabs or panes to Detach to make every tab and pane close a detach.
• Quitting the app or closing its window never ends a terminal. End All Sessions and Quit in the app menu ends every terminal on this computer, without asking first.

Find

Ctrl+Shift+F searches the focused terminal, including all of its history. Return or Ctrl+Shift+G goes to the next match, Ctrl+Alt+G to the previous. Search is plain text and case-insensitive; Aa makes it case-sensitive.

Copy and paste

• Ctrl+Shift+C copies the selection. Ctrl+C goes to the program.
• Turn on Settings → Terminal → Copy on select to copy when you select.
• When a program uses the mouse, hold Shift to select text or open the right-click menu.
• Pasting an image into a local terminal sends Ctrl+V, so AI tools can read it from the clipboard.

Links and files

• Cmd-click a URL or file path to open it. Paths with :line:column jump to that line in supported editors.
• Settings → General → Open files with picks the app for files.
• Web links open in your system browser, or in the built-in browser when Settings → Browser says so.
• Dropping files on a terminal pastes their paths.
• On a remote server, dropped and pasted files are uploaded first and the remote path is pasted. Cmd-clicking a remote file offers a read-only copy.

Shell integration

With shell integration, Nana tracks each terminal’s folder, and you can:

• Jump between prompts with Ctrl+Shift+Up and Ctrl+Shift+Down.
• Select a command’s output with Select Command Output in the Edit menu or the right-click menu.

Windows default terminal

Windows 11 can hand a new console session to a terminal instead of drawing its own console window. Turn it on in Settings → Terminal → Use Nana for new consoles, and cmd.exe, PowerShell, and double-clicked .bat files open as tabs in Nana. The same page offers Nana in Explorer’s context menu for a folder, its background, and a drive root.

• Windows Terminal has to be installed: its console host is the half of a handed-over session that Windows asks, and Nana is the half that shows it.
• A console opened while Nana is closed starts Nana. If Nana cannot show the session at all, Windows opens its own console instead, rather than leaving you with a console nothing draws.
• Turning it off puts the terminal choice back to what it was before and removes the classes and Explorer item Nana added.
• A console that starts elevated opens in an elevated Nana instance of its own. The Run as administrator flag on a console shortcut produces this. The elevated instance keeps a separate profile under %ProgramData%\nana-elevated\<user-SID>, which only a high-integrity process can read or write. It neither reads nor copies the normal profile’s settings, shell commands, kibbles, or history, so it starts with a fresh configuration, and its server does not listen for remote or mobile access. The default-terminal setting itself stays per user. An elevated server can only be reached from an elevated console: a medium-integrity console is never shown in an elevated instance, and the other way around.
• An item that launches another terminal’s executable, such as wt.exe, is a windowed application, so it never asks for a console and never passes through the setting. Windows Terminal’s Open in Terminal Explorer item is one.
• Open in Nana opens a terminal in the folder that was clicked: as a tab in the project that already is that folder, or as a tab in Home when no project is. It never adds a project, so opening a folder from Explorer cannot change your sidebar. A handed-over console lands the same way.
• Windows 11 shows the Explorer item under Show more options; the compact menu only carries items that ship inside a package.

Appearance and configuration

Fonts, colors, transparency, cursor, padding, selection, scrolling, and key bindings are in Settings → Terminal, saved to terminal.toml. Themes are in Settings → Appearance. See Settings.

• Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- change the focused pane’s font size.
• Images use the Kitty graphics protocol. Sixel and iTerm2 images are not supported.