Quickstart

This is the five-minute path from opening nodeterm to watching a coding agent work on your canvas. You’ll create a project, drop a terminal, add an agent, learn to move around, and see that none of it disappears when you quit.

Create a project

Each project is one canvas — its own tab, its own set of nodes.

1. On the welcome screen, choose Open folder.

2. Pick the folder you want to work in. That folder becomes the project’s home: new terminals and agents open there by default.

Open more folders to get more projects; each one is a separate tab in the tab bar.

Add a terminal

A terminal node is a real shell running inside tmux.

1. Right-click an empty spot on the canvas, or click the + in the bottom dock.

2. Choose terminal. A terminal node appears where you clicked, already opened in the project folder.

Terminal nodes use hover-to-focus: when you move onto a node, there’s a short dwell before the terminal takes your input. Before that dwell, the node behaves like part of the canvas — drag to move it, scroll to pan. This keeps quick gestures from landing in the shell by accident.

Add an agent

An agent node is a terminal preset that runs a coding-agent CLI for you.

1. Add a Claude, Codex, Gemini, or opencode node the same way you added a terminal — from the pane right-click menu or the dock +.

2. The CLI launches automatically in the node. (Install the CLI first if you haven’t — see Installation.)

The node’s header tells you what the agent is doing: a pulsing RUNNING badge while it works, NEEDS YOU when it’s waiting on you. When an agent finishes while your attention is elsewhere, the node gets an unread dot and — if you’ve enabled notifications — a system notification, so long-running tasks reach you even off-screen.

Move around

The canvas is meant to be flown around:

• Pan with a two-finger trackpad gesture or a middle-mouse drag.
• Zoom by pinching, to see everything running or to get in close.
• Box-select by dragging with the left mouse button; touch a node to include it.
• Group selected nodes into a labeled frame to keep related work together.
• Press ⌘K to open the command palette — create nodes, jump to a node by title or tag, switch projects, and more from the keyboard.

Quit without fear

You don’t have to tidy up before you go. When you close nodeterm, your terminal and agent sessions keep running inside tmux. Reopen the app and every node reattaches exactly where you left it — running processes and all.

To understand how that works — including what survives a full machine reboot — read Terminal persistence.