Terminal sessions

Every tab is one session: your login shell for local tabs, the system ssh for host tabs.

Local sessions

Local tabs start your default shell as a login shell, with TERM=xterm-256color, true-color support, and TERM_PROGRAM=OliTerm. Scrollback keeps 10,000 lines.

SSH sessions

SSH tabs run the system /usr/bin/ssh rather than a bundled SSH library. Everything you have configured for the command line works unchanged:

Each SSH tab additionally opens a private connection-sharing socket. The file browser and file transfers reuse the session’s already-authenticated connection through it — listings work even on password-only hosts without asking again, and closing one tab never disturbs another tab’s connection.

Logging in with your SSH key

To stop typing a host’s password, put your public key on it once: log in as usual, then choose Shell > Install SSH Key on Host… (⇧⌘K) and click Install Key. If ~/.ssh holds more than one public key, choose one from the pop-up menu — id_ed25519.pub is preselected when you have it.

Like ssh-copy-id, OliTerm adds the key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the host and creates ~/.ssh with private permissions if needed. The key goes over the tab’s own connection, so the host doesn’t ask for the password again, and a key that is already listed there is left alone.

Note ssh offers keys with the standard names — id_ed25519, id_ecdsa, id_rsa — by itself. A key with another name is only used when it’s loaded in ssh-agent or set as IdentityFile for the host in ~/.ssh/config.

Working in the terminal

The Option key

By default the Option key types the characters of your keyboard layout, as in Terminal.app — on a German keyboard that is ⌥L for @, ⌥5/⌥6 for [ and ], ⌥8/⌥9 for { and }, ⌥7 for |, and ⌥N for ~. ⌥← and ⌥→ move the cursor by a word.

If you rely on Emacs-style shortcuts instead, turn on Use Option as Meta key in OliTerm > Settings… (⌘,): Option then sends Escape plus the key, so ⌥X is Meta-X, and the layout characters above are no longer typeable. View > Use Option as Meta Key (⌥⌘O) toggles the same setting.

Appearance

The terminal follows the system appearance automatically — a light paper background in Light Mode, near-black in Dark Mode — with the classic Terminal color palette.

When a session ends

When the shell or SSH connection exits, a banner appears at the bottom of the terminal — “Session ended.”, or the exit code or signal if there was one — with a Restart Session button that starts the same session again (for SSH tabs: reconnects to the host).

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