Work in a Terminal

Not everything is a notebook. Installing a package, running the tests, checking what git log says — those are a shell, and Zasper has one built in so you do not have to leave the window to use it.

Open One

The terminal button is in the status bar, at the bottom of the window, next to the branch name. It is there whatever tab is in front, because starting a shell is not something that belongs to the notebook you happen to have open.

To start one somewhere other than the project root, right-click a folder in the file explorer and choose Open Terminal Here. The shell starts in that folder.

A terminal opens as a tab, beside your notebooks and files — see Files and Tabs for what that means for closing and reopening them. Open as many as you want; each one is its own shell.

Which Shell It Runs

Your own: Zasper starts whatever $SHELL names, as a login shell, so your prompt, aliases and PATH are the ones you already have. If $SHELL is empty or names something that is not installed, it falls back to the shell your account lists, and then to /bin/sh.

That is also why a conda or uv environment you activate in a terminal behaves exactly as it does outside Zasper — Working with Conda and Working with UV cover making those environments into kernels.

The text scales with the rest of the window: Increase / Decrease Font Size from the command palette changes code, output and terminal text together.

What A Terminal Is Not

It does not come back. Zasper reopens the tabs you had, but not terminals: a new connection is a new shell, so a restored terminal would be an empty prompt wearing the name of the one you had. Anything you want to keep, keep in a script.

It is not available on Windows. When the Zasper server runs on Windows there is no terminal button and no Open Terminal Here, because the terminal backend is built on a Unix pseudo-terminal. Running the server under WSL gives you both, and is the recommended way to use Zasper on Windows — Installation has the details.