Terminal & Activity Tab
Every agent session in Kangentic has a dedicated terminal powered by xterm.js. You can watch agents work in real-time, review their output, and interact when needed.
Bottom Panel
Section titled “Bottom Panel”The bottom panel is your primary monitoring interface. It has two types of tabs:
Session Tabs
Section titled “Session Tabs”Each running agent gets its own terminal tab. Click a tab to switch between sessions. The active tab is highlighted, and tabs update their labels to reflect the agent’s current state.
Activity Tab
Section titled “Activity Tab”The leftmost tab is the Activity Tab - a structured list of events from all sessions. Unlike the terminal tabs which show raw PTY output, the Activity Tab shows clean, readable entries:
- Tool calls (which tool, which file)
- Idle events (agent stopped or is waiting)
- Session state changes (spawned, suspended, resumed)
The Activity Tab is a plain DOM list (not a terminal emulator), so it’s lightweight and easy to scan. It’s the best way to get an overview of what all your agents are doing without switching between individual terminal tabs.
Resize
Section titled “Resize”Drag the panel divider to resize the bottom panel. The terminal resizes to match. Resize events are debounced during drag to prevent output corruption and excessive re-rendering.
Per-Session Terminals
Section titled “Per-Session Terminals”Each running agent gets its own terminal tab showing:
- The Claude Code agent’s conversation output
- Any commands the agent runs
- File modifications and tool usage
- Agent thinking and decision-making
You can have multiple terminal tabs open simultaneously and switch between them to monitor different agents.
Task Detail Dialog
Section titled “Task Detail Dialog”Click a task card to open the detail dialog. The dialog includes a full terminal view that takes ownership from the bottom panel while open. This gives you a larger terminal view for focused work. Press Ctrl+Shift+M (Cmd+Shift+M on macOS) to maximize the dialog, and drag the vertical divider to resize the terminal against the Browser or Changes pane - see Task Detail Dialog.
When you close the dialog, the bottom panel reclaims the terminal session automatically.
Features
Section titled “Features”Scrollback
Section titled “Scrollback”Terminal sessions maintain a full scrollback buffer. Scroll up to review earlier agent output without losing your place. The buffer persists for the lifetime of the session.
Search
Section titled “Search”Use the built-in terminal search to find specific output within a session. This is especially useful for long-running agents that produce extensive output.
WebGL Acceleration
Section titled “WebGL Acceleration”Terminal rendering uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated text drawing. If WebGL is unavailable (e.g., in some VM environments), xterm.js automatically falls back to a canvas-based renderer.
File Drop
Section titled “File Drop”Drag files from your file manager onto the terminal to insert their file paths into the active session. Paths containing spaces are automatically quoted. Multiple files are inserted as a space-separated list. A visual overlay appears when files are dragged over the terminal area.
Copy, Paste, and Select
Section titled “Copy, Paste, and Select”Select text in the terminal to copy it. Standard terminal selection and clipboard operations work as expected. On all platforms, you can also right-click in the terminal to paste from the clipboard.
Context Bar
Section titled “Context Bar”An info strip sits beneath the terminal (and inside the task detail dialog) showing live session telemetry:
- Shell and agent version the session was launched with
- Elapsed time - a ticking wall-clock timer since the session started
- Model, session cost, and token usage (input + output)
- Tool calls - a live count of completed tool calls. Click the pill to expand a per-tool breakdown.
- Context window fraction (e.g.
28k / 200k) with a progress bar. The tooltip breaks this down into cache vs. conversation tokens. - Rate-limit bars (Claude only) - two bars show your current 5-hour session window and weekly plan-usage quota, with a reset-time hint on hover. These only appear when Claude reports quota usage in its
status.json.
Most pills are individually toggleable under Settings -> Context Bar or the contextBar.* keys - see Configuration Reference. The model and effort pills always show when the adapter reports them and double as click-targets for the per-task model/effort picker, so they have no show/hide toggles.
Model Picker
Section titled “Model Picker”The model dropdown (in the context bar picker and in per-task and per-column override dialogs) is fed by two sources: the models the agent CLI advertises, plus a persistent cache of every model ID Kangentic has seen you actually use. New models are discovered automatically - switch to one via the CLI’s /model command and it appears in the dropdowns from then on, surviving restarts, with no app update needed.
To keep the list readable, near-duplicate IDs are grouped: each base model gets one row, a 1M chip on the row selects its [1m] long-context variant, and dated snapshot builds (like claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) collapse into a Pinned builds section that auto-expands when your search only matches a pinned ID. Every exact model string stays selectable - grouping is display-only and the chosen ID is passed verbatim at spawn time.
Terminal Preview on Cards
Section titled “Terminal Preview on Cards”Task cards can show a small live preview of their terminal output directly on the board. This lets you glance at agent progress without opening a terminal tab or the detail dialog.
Terminal preview is off by default. Enable it in Settings under the Terminal tab, or set terminal.showPreview to true in the config file.
Terminal and Session State
Section titled “Terminal and Session State”The terminal state is tied to the agent session:
- Running sessions - Terminal is live, showing real-time output
- Suspended sessions - Terminal shows the last output before suspension. When resumed, new output continues from where it left off.
- Completed sessions - Terminal is read-only, showing the full session history
Keyboard Shortcuts
Section titled “Keyboard Shortcuts”Standard terminal keyboard shortcuts work within Kangentic’s terminal:
| Windows / Linux | macOS | Action |
|---|---|---|
Ctrl+C | Ctrl+C | Send interrupt to the agent process |
Ctrl+Shift+C | Cmd+C | Copy selected text |
Ctrl+Shift+V | Cmd+V | Paste from clipboard |
Ctrl+Shift+F | Cmd+F | Open terminal search |
Ctrl+Shift+K | Cmd+K | Clear terminal display |
| Right-click | Right-click | Paste from clipboard |
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”Next: Activity Detection - the activity state shown next to each terminal.
See also:
- Notifications & Monitoring - desktop alerts when terminals go idle
- Session Persistence - how terminal scrollback survives restarts