The built-in terminal (Alt+X)

Not in XTree or ZTreeWin: your shell ($SHELL) running inside Xylem’s screen, in the bottom part, with the tree and the files still visible above it.

• Alt+X opens the terminal and goes back to Xylem. The shell keeps running while hidden, with its history and whatever it had on screen; exit closes it.
• Alt+Z opens it in full screen; inside, it switches between full screen and the panel. Alt+X then reopens it the way it was.
• The tree follows the shell: a cd in the terminal moves the tree’s cursor to the same directory (Linux).
• The shell follows the tree: when you enter the terminal from another directory, it goes there. This only happens when the shell is waiting at the prompt; with a program running (vim, less…), nothing is typed.
• $XY_TAGGED has the tagged files, set when you enter the terminal. It is an array: in bash, "${XY_TAGGED[@]}" (cp "${XY_TAGGED[@]}" ~/backup); in zsh and fish, $XY_TAGGED. With other shells (sh, dash) there is only the cd.
• Alt+O types the tagged files at the cursor, quoted and relative to the shell’s directory (wc -l 'a.txt' 'b c.txt'). From the tree or the file window, it opens the terminal and types them.
• Shift+PgUp/PgDn scroll back through what went off the screen.
• On leaving the terminal, the open directories are reread.
• Quitting Xylem ends the shell and whatever runs in it. If a program is running there (say, vim), Q and Alt+Q ask first, even with confirm_quit off (Linux and macOS).
• Programs that take the whole screen (vim, htop, less) work inside it; all keys go to them, except Alt+X, Alt+Z and Alt+O. That is why F1 and Alt+H do not open this help inside the terminal.

Its own history

The commands typed in it go to a shell history of their own, apart from your other terminals’: ~/.local/state/xylem/bash_history (zsh_history…), through HISTFILE; in fish, the xylem session. If your rc file sets HISTFILE unconditionally, it wins. Turn it off with F12 (page 3) or terminal_history = false.

Keys and colors

The keys can be changed in [keys.any] (terminal, terminal_full, terminal_tagged): Alt+T, for instance, is the “Terminal” menu in some terminals. The colors are chosen with F12 (page 2) or terminal_theme: native (those of the terminal Xylem runs in), xylem (the background and text of Xylem’s theme), solarized, gruvbox, nord, dracula or one_dark.

To enter the terminal and the directory, Xylem writes a small script in a folder of its own (in ~/.cache/xylem/, readable only by you) and types . script at the prompt; the leading space keeps the line out of the history in bash (ignorespace) and zsh (HIST_IGNORE_SPACE). Inside the terminal, XY_TERMINAL=1, for prompts and scripts that want to know; the terminal on a remote machine sets it too (useful, for instance, to keep a ~/.bashrc from starting tmux there).