# SSH Terminal > Full interactive SSH terminal with tabs, splits, and WebGL rendering. Source: https://reachssh.com/features/ssh-terminal/ The terminal in Reach is built on xterm.js with WebGL rendering. It handles 256 colors and truecolor, sets `TERM=xterm-256color` and `COLORTERM=truecolor`, so tools like `htop`, `vim`, and everything else that expects a modern terminal will render correctly. If your GPU doesn't support WebGL, it falls back to canvas automatically. The font is JetBrains Mono by default, with SF Mono and Cascadia Code as fallbacks. You can change this in Settings > Appearance. ## Tabs Each terminal session gets its own tab. You can have as many open as you want — local shells and SSH connections mixed together. Local tabs show a terminal icon, SSH tabs show a globe. Keyboard shortcuts for tab management: - **Ctrl+T** — open a new local terminal tab - **Ctrl+Shift+W** — close the current tab - **Ctrl+Tab** — switch to the next tab - **Ctrl+Shift+Tab** — switch to the previous tab On Mac, use Cmd instead of Ctrl. Tab titles update automatically based on the shell prompt. For SSH tabs, it picks up `user@host` from the terminal title escape sequence. If you `sudo su -` to another user, the tab title updates to reflect the new username. ## Clipboard **Ctrl+C** does two things depending on context. If you have text selected in the terminal, it copies. If nothing is selected, it sends the interrupt signal (SIGINT) like you'd expect. No weird mode switching needed. **Ctrl+V** pastes. Right-click also pastes. A paste carrying a newline is shown to you first, because that newline runs the command the moment it arrives — a stray copy can execute on a server before you have read it. The dialog says how many lines are coming and shows them. If you paste blocks all day, that question gets old. **Settings → General → Confirm multi-line pastes** turns it off, and the dialog itself carries a **Don't ask again** checkbox that does the same thing without a trip to Settings. Leaving it on, **Ask from** sets how many lines it takes to earn a confirmation: raise it to 10 and short pastes go straight through while a wall of text still stops. The lowest it goes is 2, since a one-word paste stopping for confirmation would read as a bug rather than a setting — to silence it entirely, use the toggle. ## Input methods Chinese, Japanese and Korean input all work in the terminal, with the candidate window following the caret. One quirk worth knowing about, because it comes from Windows rather than from Reach: dragging a window by its title bar puts the system into a modal loop, and while that loop runs the webview cannot tell the input method where the caret has moved to. The stale position outlives the drag, so the candidate window would appear where the caret used to be — or in the corner of the screen. Reach watches for the window settling after a move and quietly re-establishes the caret position, so the candidate window returns to where it belongs. It leaves the terminal alone if you are part-way through composing a character, since interrupting that would lose what you had typed. ## Split Panes You can split the terminal area horizontally or vertically. The divider between panes is draggable — grab it and slide to resize. Neither pane can shrink below 100px. ## OS Detection When you connect to a server over SSH, Reach runs a quick check to figure out what OS it's running. It reads `/etc/os-release` to identify the distribution (Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine, Rocky, etc.), or falls back to `uname -s` for macOS and BSD. The distro icon shows up on the tab so you can tell your servers apart at a glance. It recognizes 50+ Linux distributions. ## Color Initialization SSH connections get a color setup script injected automatically on connect. This sets up `ls --color=auto`, colored grep, and a PS1 prompt with colors (green for regular users, red for root). It runs silently and clears the screen, so you get a clean terminal with colors working out of the box. ## Resize and Scrollback The terminal resizes automatically when you drag the window, toggle the sidebar, or resize split panes. A 50ms debounce prevents excessive resize calls. The backend gets notified too (via `SIGWINCH` for PTY, `window_change` for SSH) so the remote shell knows about the new dimensions. Scrollback is set to 10,000 lines. Scroll up with the mouse wheel or `Shift+PageUp`. ## Monitoring Bar When you're connected to a server via SSH, a bar appears at the bottom of the terminal showing live system stats: CPU, RAM, disk usage, and logged-in users. Stats are color-coded — green under 60%, yellow from 60-84%, red at 85% and above. The monitoring polls every 3 seconds over the existing SSH connection. No agents to install. If your username shows up in the logged-in users list, it gets tagged with "(you)". Hover over the users section to see the full list with TTY info. Each SSH connection has its own monitoring data. Switch tabs and the bar updates to show the right server's stats. ## Local Terminals (PTY) Local tabs spawn a shell on your machine using a real pseudo-terminal. On Windows it defaults to PowerShell (with `-NoLogo`), on Linux/macOS it uses your `$SHELL` or falls back to `/bin/bash`. Each PTY gets its own OS thread for reading output, so one busy terminal doesn't block the others. Data comes through in 4KB chunks, which keeps things responsive even with heavy output. ## SSH Connections SSH is implemented in pure Rust via russh — no OpenSSH dependency. Connections go through: 1. TCP connect (15-second timeout) 2. SSH handshake 3. Authentication (password or private key) 4. PTY allocation 5. Shell request 6. Color initialization Data flows through an async event loop using `tokio::select!` to handle both incoming data from the server and outgoing keystrokes from you simultaneously. Stderr is merged with stdout so you see everything in one stream. ## Jump Host Chains If your session has a ProxyJump chain configured, Reach connects through each hop using SSH `direct-tcpip` channels. The chain is ordered outermost-first — connect to bastion A, tunnel through to bastion B, then reach the target. All intermediate connections stay alive for the duration. See the [Jump Hosts](../jump-hosts/) page for details. ## Buffer Access The terminal buffer is accessible to internal features and plugins. The last 50 lines can be read programmatically, which is how the AI assistant gets context about what you're doing. The full scrollback buffer line count is also available.