The ⌘J terminal
Sheru's name is シェル — sheru, Japanese for "shell." The whole app is built around one thing Finder never gave you: a real command line that's always one keystroke away, sitting right at the folder you're looking at. Press ⌘J and a terminal slides up from the bottom of the window, already in the current folder.
Opening and closing it#
⌘J toggles the terminal panel; the same command lives under View ▸ Show/Hide Terminal. Hiding it with ⌘J keeps your session alive — the panel just collapses, and reopening brings back your scrollback and any running processes exactly as you left them.
There's also a small ✕ button in the panel's top-right corner. Unlike ⌘J, ✕ ends the session: it closes the shell and starts fresh, so the next time you open the terminal you get a clean buffer rather than the old session.
A real shell#
The panel is a genuine, interactive zsh — the same shell you'd get in Terminal.app, with your usual environment, PATH, and configuration. It's a full terminal emulator, so interactive programs, colors, and TUIs all work as expected. The panel also follows your system appearance, switching between light and dark automatically.
The folder stays in sync — both ways#
The terminal's working directory and the folder you're browsing stay in lockstep, in both directions:
- Browse, and the shell follows. Double-click into a folder, go Back or Forward, or jump to the enclosing folder, and the terminal changes directory to match.
- Change directory, and the browser follows. Type
cd(orpushd/popd) in the terminal and the file view moves to that folder too.
You can drive your work from whichever side feels natural — point and click, or type — and the other side keeps up.
One terminal per tab, remembered between sessions#
Each tab has its own independent terminal session, so the terminal in one tab is never affected by another. Whether the terminal is open and how tall it is are remembered globally, so a new tab (⌘T), a new window (⌘N), and your next launch all start with the terminal set up the way you last left it. Drag the bar at the top edge of the panel to resize it.
Where the terminal is available#
The terminal attaches to a real shell, so it's offered wherever one exists: a local folder opens a local shell, and an SSH (SFTP) connector opens a shell on the remote machine over SSH. Other connectors — object storage like S3 or R2, and service connectors like GitHub — are read over the network rather than run as a process, so there's no shell to attach to them. When you focus one of those, ⌘J and the View ▸ Show/Hide Terminal menu item are disabled, and an open terminal collapses; navigate back to a folder with a shell and it returns.
See remote filesystems and service connectors for what those connectors can do.