‹ Guides

Menus made for tablets and 2-in-1s

On a wide tablet or a 2-in-1, every choice in Term now opens as a small menu right under what you clicked: settings, host fields, scripts and jump hosts. No more half-empty panels in the middle of the screen, and everything works with a mouse and keyboard.

v26.8.4+ · Written

Phones keep their full-screen pickers.

Still in alpha on PCs and 2-in-1s

We are still shaping how Term works with a free window, a mouse and a hardware keyboard, and some things will be rough. If something looks wrong or gets in your way, please tell us in Settings › Account › Feedback & suggestions — a sentence and a screenshot is plenty. Tablets get these changes too.

Settings open where you click

Tap a setting with a value — Theme, Frame rate, Terminal font size, a timeout — and its options open right under the value, sized to fit. The current choice has a blue check. Pick one and the menu closes; tap anywhere else (or press Esc) to leave it as it was.

Term's Terminal settings on a wide tablet. Frame rate is open as a small menu under its row with three choices — Battery saver, Balanced (checked) and Smooth — each with a one-line description.
Short choices, short menus. Frame rate shows its three options and nothing else, next to the value you tapped.

Font size and cursor style open the same way, with their live preview inside the menu, so you can try a few sizes before you close it.

Host fields: encoding, group, key and startup script

In the host editor, the fields you pick from open as menus under the field. The longer ones have a search box at the top, and a + New group / New key / New script row at the end: create one and it is filled in for you. The startup-script menu opens the folder of the current script, so you can see what is selected.

The host editor on a wide tablet with the Character encoding menu open under its field: UTF-8 checked at the top, then GB18030, Big5, Shift_JIS and EUC-KR, with a thin scroll bar.
Character encoding, at a glance. UTF-8 on its own, then the Chinese, Japanese and Korean sets, then the Western ones.

Run a script from the terminal

The </> button above the terminal opens your scripts in one panel: search at the top, and each folder as a thin header you can open and close. Type a few letters to narrow it down, then click a script to run it in the current tab. With a hardware keyboard, your typing goes into the search box, not the terminal.

Term on a 2-in-1 with a terminal tab open. The scripts menu hangs under the </> button: a search box, then the System folder open with System info, OS release, Memory usage, CPU info and Live resource snapshot, each with its command in grey.
Your scripts, one click away. Folders fold to a single line, so even a long list stays easy to scan.

Reorder jump hosts with a mouse

Jump hosts now open as a panel under the Jump host field. Each hop has ↑ and ↓ buttons, and right-clicking a hop gives Move up, Move down and Remove. On a touch screen, long-press and drag still works. More about chains in Jump hosts.

The host editor on a 2-in-1 with the jump-host panel open: This device, then hop 1 Sandbox · bare with a down arrow and a remove cross, hop 2 Sandbox · ubuntu with an up arrow, and Add jump host. The field below reads Sandbox · bare → Sandbox · ubuntu.
Arrows for mouse users. A mouse cannot long-press, so the hops have their own move buttons. The field under the panel shows the new order as you go.

Phones stay the same

On a phone, and on a fold or tablet narrower than the two-column layout, these choices still open as full screens, with room for your thumb.

Keyboard

Esc closes a menu. If its search box has the cursor, the first Esc leaves the search and the second closes the menu.

Related: A roomier Term on PCs and 2-in-1s · Term on PCs and 2-in-1s