Guake Terminal

The Guake Terminal is a drop-down shell panel — named for the Linux Guake terminal that pioneered the pattern. It slides down from the top of the window, takes the keystrokes you throw at it, and slides back up when you’re done. No window switching, no spawning a new agent just to run git status.

How to open it

Press the dedicated Guake shortcut (configurable in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts; default uses the backtick / grave key). The panel animates down over whatever view you’re currently using — 3D, 2D, Dashboard, or Commander. Press the shortcut again (or Esc) to hide it.

The terminal persists its session while hidden, so a long-running command keeps going, and its scrollback survives re-opens.

What it’s for

Ad-hoc shell

git, ls, grep, docker logs — the short stuff you don’t want to route through an agent.

Diagnose builds

Tail a build log or run a one-off npm run test while your agents work uninterrupted on other areas.

Inspect working dirs

Jump into any agent’s cwd and poke around the filesystem — perfect for confirming what an agent actually wrote.

Zero context tax

The terminal is your shell, not a model session. It doesn’t consume any agent’s context window.

Typical flow

• Something looks wrong on one of your agents. Summon Guake, cd into that agent’s working directory, inspect git status yourself.
• Decide whether to correct by hand, re-prompt the agent, or restart from a snapshot.
• Dismiss the terminal and get back to driving the team.

Gotchas

This is your real shell

The Guake panel runs as a native PTY on the host machine. Destructive commands (rm -rf, git reset --hard) are just as destructive here as in any terminal — there’s no permission-mode sandbox like agents have. Act accordingly.

For stream-heavy commands, use streaming exec

Long-running commands that need to surface progress to the rest of the system are better fired through the Streaming Command Execution skill — they appear as tasks in the tracking UI. Keep Guake for quick, human-only inspection.

Shortcut binding varies

If the grave / backtick key collides with another app-level shortcut, rebind it under Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts. The binding is per-user, not per-session.

Related

• Spotlight Search — a different overlay for navigating to agents, files, and actions instead of running shell commands.
• Commander View — when you want every agent’s terminal, not a separate shell.
• Keyboard Shortcuts — rebind the Guake key.