Pads hold text you wrote. The other two pane types on the boards overlay hold something running: a terminal with a real shell in it, and a browser showing a live page. Both are built in — there’s nothing to install.
Terminal panes
Open the overlay, pick Terminal in the toolbar’s app picker, and click New terminal. A shell starts immediately and you can type into it like any terminal.
Screenshot pending: overlay-terminal.png
It opens your shell
The pane starts the login shell configured for your macOS account, as a login shell — so your own config, aliases and PATH are there. That includes shells installed by Homebrew.
This was wrong before version 0.6.2: the pane always opened the system /bin/zsh, so anyone whose account shell was a Homebrew zsh landed in Apple’s one with none of their setup and had to type zsh to get their own. If your configured shell is missing or isn’t runnable, the pane falls back to /bin/zsh rather than failing.
The pane’s shell is disposable
A strip at the top of the pane carries an Ephemeral PTY ⓘ control. It says what it means: the shell process in a terminal pane exists only while the pane is on screen. Closing the pane, hiding the overlay, switching boards, or quitting Clabrate all end that shell. Bring the pane back and you get a fresh login shell.
That’s deliberate — Clabrate isn’t trying to be a terminal multiplexer. If you want something to survive, run something that owns its own sessions inside the pane: tmux, or an agent runner. Those keep running when Clabrate’s client goes away, because they aren’t Clabrate’s processes.
The explanation collapses with Got it once you’ve read it, and the Ephemeral PTY control brings it back any time.
Shell, Herdr, tmux
If you have tmux or Herdr installed, the pane’s top strip offers Open tmux and Open Herdr UI — one click swaps the pane’s client to that program. Clabrate remembers an explicit choice and relaunches the same client when the pane comes back; New shell and Start fresh shell clear that and go back to a plain login shell.
Commands you type yourself are never inspected and never change what the pane relaunches as. Typing tmux into the shell is just a command; only the buttons set a remembered client.
Alongside New terminal, there’s a secondary Attach Herdr pane action for observing an existing Herdr-owned terminal read-only, with an explicit Take control step. That’s a niche workflow — if you don’t use Herdr, ignore it.
Letting the assistant use a terminal
The assistant can list, open, read from, type into and close terminal panes — but only if you install the Terminals add-on from Settings → Add-ons and grant it. It asks for three things in plain English:
| Permission | What it lets the assistant do |
|---|---|
| Read your terminals | Read what’s on screen in Clabrate’s terminal panes, including recent command output |
| Type into your terminals | Type into a Clabrate terminal and press Enter — commands run as you |
| Open and close terminals | Open new terminal panes in Clabrate, and close them again |
Take the second one seriously: it runs commands as you.
Because of that, typing is gated twice. Granting the permission isn’t enough — there’s a separate switch in Settings → Privacy & setup → Terminal drive → Drive its own terminals, off by default, and turning it on asks you to tick a box confirming you understand the assistant will run commands as you. Even then it only applies to terminals the assistant opened itself this session; terminals you opened yourself are never writable by the assistant. If it tries anyway, it’s refused with a message telling you what’s missing.
Revoke either the permission or the Terminal drive switch at any time.
Note: Watch for the two different badges on the Terminals card. The individual permissions are marked Local — stays on your Mac, which is true: nothing is sent anywhere. The card as a whole is marked Controls your Mac, which is also true: typing into a shell acts outside Clabrate. They’re answering different questions — where data goes, and what the tool can do.
Note: Terminal panes turn off the screen-reader mode in their renderer so that fast typing is delivered correctly. VoiceOver still names the pane, but it won’t read shell output line by line. This is a known tradeoff, not a bug — a toggle to prefer announcements over typing fidelity is still open.
Browser panes
Pick Browser in the app picker and click New browser. The pane’s title bar has a URL field: type an address, press Enter, and the page loads in the pane. It’s a real browser view, not a screenshot — the page keeps running while you work elsewhere.
The pane remembers its URL, so it comes back to the same page. You can leave the scheme off — example.com is enough.
That URL field is the whole of the navigation chrome: there are no Back, Forward or Reload buttons, and a browser pane can’t be renamed (the URL field occupies the title bar, so the small label at its left is just a drag grip).
Drag the tab in the bottom-right corner to resize it. (Before 0.6.2 that grip could be unreachable on a pane you hadn’t focused; it isn’t now.)
Marking a page up
The pencil button in a browser pane’s title bar freezes the page to a still and hands you a small markup toolbar: arrow, freehand marker, text, and a sticky note, in a choice of colours, with Undo.
Done flattens the still and your marks into one full-resolution image and copies it to the clipboard; the pane goes back to live browsing. Cancel throws the markup away. There’s no saved markup layer — it’s a one-shot export, for pasting a marked-up screenshot into a message or an issue.
The camera button beside it copies the pane as an image without the markup step.
The Secure Keyboard Entry banner
Sign in to a site in a browser pane and you may see a banner appear at the top of the canvas:
🔒 Secure Keyboard Entry is on (a password field in a browser pane). Escape and auto-hide are paused until you close or leave that page.
Here’s what’s happening. When a password field is focused, macOS turns on Secure Keyboard Entry — a system-wide lockout that stops any app from observing keystrokes. That’s protecting your password, and it’s working correctly. But it also means Clabrate can’t see Esc, so the canvas’s usual keyboard exit is temporarily gone.
Normally Clabrate refuses to leave a screen-covering surface up without an escape hatch, and hides the overlay (see the overlay page). Doing that here would be absurd — the canvas would vanish out from under the login you’re in the middle of. So instead the canvas stays, the banner explains why Esc stopped working, and it gives you a mouse-clickable way out: Close browser pane, which closes the browser panes on the board. With the password field gone, macOS releases the lock and Esc works again.
Moving off the password field clears it too. The banner disappears on its own.
Common questions
My aliases / PATH aren’t there. Since 0.6.2 the pane opens your account’s login shell, so they should be. If you’re on an older build, update.
I lost my shell when I hid the overlay. That’s the ephemeral design — see above. Run tmux (or the Open tmux button) inside the pane for something that survives.
The overlay’s ⌘⇧F or Esc doesn’t fire while I’m in a terminal or browser pane. Those panes take the keystroke first, exactly as a real terminal or browser would. Click an empty part of the canvas, then press it.
Can the assistant browse for me in a browser pane? No. It can move and arrange browser panes, and close them, but it can’t create one or send it to a URL — and it can’t read the page. The reading and typing tools exist for terminals only.
The assistant opened a terminal but won’t run anything in it. Turn on Settings → Privacy & setup → Terminal drive, and check the Terminals add-on has Type into your terminals granted for the model you’re using.
The assistant won’t type into the terminal I opened. By design. It can only write to terminals it opened itself, with Terminal drive on.
Should I sign in to things inside a browser pane? You can — the Secure Keyboard Entry banner above exists precisely because that flow now works. Sessions live in Clabrate’s own web view.