Terminal Setup

Most terminals work out of the box. The notes below cover the few cases where a key needs help.

The console draws its own software caret and reads keys through Ink's input layer. It does not draw the hardware cursor by default. The only setup most users need is making sure Shift+Enter reaches the console as a distinct key so it can insert a soft newline.

Soft newline

The console reads Shift+Enter (a held shift with return) as a soft newline. If your terminal cannot distinguish Shift+Enter from a bare Enter, you can always use Ctrl+J, which the console treats as a newline regardless of terminal support.

Hardware cursor

By default the console hides the terminal's own cursor and draws a software caret (the inverted block in the composer), which works everywhere. If you prefer the terminal's hardware cursor — for example to position an IME candidate window — turn on the showHardwareCursor preference:

{
  "showHardwareCursor": true
}

You can also toggle it in /settings → "Hardware cursor". It is off by default for compatibility.

Clipboard image paste

Ctrl+V attaches an image from the OS clipboard. It shells out to a platform tool, so the tool must be installed:

Platform	Tool(s) tried
macOS	pngpaste (falls back to osascript)
Linux (Wayland)	wl-paste --type image/png
Linux (X11)	xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o

If no image is on the clipboard, or the platform tool is missing, the console shows a "No image on the clipboard." status and leaves the buffer unchanged. Clipboard image paste is not supported on Windows (see windows.md).

On macOS install pngpaste with brew install pngpaste; on Linux install wl-clipboard (for wl-paste) or xclip.

External editor

Ctrl+G opens the current composer buffer in an external editor and reads the edited text back. The editor command is resolved from $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, then a vi fallback. A command with flags is honoured (e.g. EDITOR="code --wait").

export VISUAL="nvim"
# or
export EDITOR="code --wait"

Terminal title

The console sets the terminal window/tab title to the live session name (falling back to indus console) via the standard OSC 2 control sequence. This is skipped automatically when stdout is not a TTY, so redirecting output to a file or pipe never leaks escape bytes.

Colours

The console renders with 24-bit colours derived from the active scheme (see themes.md). Most modern terminals support truecolor. Check yours:

echo $COLORTERM  # "truecolor" or "24bit" indicates support