Shared control across windows
How a terminal behaves when desktop and portal are watching it at the same time.
- Desktop
- Web Portal
Because terminals run on the host (the desktop app or CLI daemon), the same terminal can be visible from more than one window at the same time — the desktop app and the portal in a browser, two browser tabs, or any combination. Glueprint coordinates this so two windows don’t fight over what size the PTY should be.
Owner vs viewer
At any moment one window owns the terminal. The owner can:
- Type into the shell.
- Resize the PTY (changing the columns and rows the shell sees).
Other windows watch the same terminal in viewer mode. They see every byte of output, can scroll, can copy text out, and can use Find — but typing is disabled and they don’t push resize events to the host.
The header of a viewer-mode terminal shows which window currently owns it.
Take Over
Click Take Over in the terminal header to claim ownership. The previous owner drops to viewer mode immediately. The PTY is then atomically resized to your window’s dimensions and the visible scrollback is replayed so you start from a coherent state.
Use this when you opened a session on your laptop, walked away, and now want to keep typing from the portal — or the reverse.
Pop-out windows
On desktop, the terminal can also be detached into its own window. The detached window owns the terminal; the main session view drops to viewer until you close the pop-out or hit Take Over in the main window.
Why a single owner
A PTY only has one set of dimensions at a time. If two windows of different sizes both pushed resize events, the shell would thrash and line wrapping would break. Single-owner control keeps the shell stable while still letting other windows watch.