---

Not a fake shell: every tab gets a real TTY, so vim, htop, git rebase -i, a dev server and colored output all behave the way they do in your terminal app.

Desktop only. The plugin drives a native pty and cannot run on mobile.

What it does

• Opens below the editor, and comes back on the next start if you left it open. Its height is a share of the editor area that you set once; the divider stays draggable.
• Tabs. Each tab is its own shell. Closing one kills that shell and nothing else, and a shell that exits keeps its output so you can still read what happened.
• Jump to a folder. One button types cd to the vault, another to the folder of the note you are editing. Paths are quoted, so a folder named $(id) is typed, not executed.
• Its own palette. Light or dark, deliberately independent of the Obsidian theme: the 16 ANSI colors need a fixed contrast baseline to stay readable.
• Six interface languages, following Obsidian by default.

Install

From the community store

Install and enable Open Terminal Panel, then open the panel. The first time, it asks to download one more piece: node-pty, the native module that provides the TTY.

The store only ever installs main.js, manifest.json and styles.css, so a native binary cannot travel with a plugin. Instead the panel shows the exact URL — an asset on this repository's own release, matching the plugin version and your platform — and waits for you to press the button. Nothing is downloaded in the background, and the archive is unpacked only into the plugin's own folder. The SHA-256 of what was downloaded is printed after the install, and the same checksum is published next to the release as node-pty-<platform>.tar.gz.sha256.txt.

To do it yourself instead, unpack that archive into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/open-terminal-panel/.

Prebuilt components are published for macOS on Apple silicon and Intel — those are the builds this project can produce and verify. On Windows or Linux the panel says so and you install from source instead, which builds node-pty on the machine itself.

From source

git clone https://github.com/aione314159/open-terminal.git
cd open-terminal
./cli/install_obsidian_plugin.sh            # first vault found in obsidian.json
./cli/install_obsidian_plugin.sh /path/to/vault

This builds the bundle, copies it into the vault, and installs node-pty from your own npm install — so the download step never appears. Then reload community plugins in Obsidian and enable Open Terminal Panel.

Use

Where	What
Ribbon icon	Open the panel
Command palette	Open / toggle the panel, new tab
+ in the tab strip	New tab in the configured working folder
Middle click a tab	Close it
Header buttons	cd to vault · cd to the note's folder · clear · restart · light/dark

A tab whose shell has exited keeps its output, struck through in the tab strip. Press restart to get a live shell back in the same folder.

Settings

Setting	Default	Notes
Working folder	vault folder	Where new tabs start. ~ is expanded. A folder that no longer exists falls back to the vault.
Shell path	$SHELL	Started as a login shell, so PATH and your profile are complete — Obsidian is launched from the GUI and inherits almost nothing.
Always open on startup	off	Opens the panel on every start. Off, the panel follows the saved workspace: it comes back only if it was open when you quit.
Panel height	30 %	Share of the editor area.
Palette	dark	Terminal only; does not follow the Obsidian theme.
Font size	12 px	Applies to every tab.
Interface language	follow Obsidian	English and 繁體中文 are reviewed; 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Français are community translations.

"Test the setup" in the settings tab checks the shell path, the working folder and whether the native component is installed.

How it works

main.ts      plugin, settings tab, panel placement below the editor
view.ts      the panel: tab strip, header actions, one visible session
session.ts   one shell — an xterm instance bound to a pty
runtime.ts   first-run download and unpack of the native component
pty.ts       loads node-pty from the plugin folder by absolute path
theme.ts     the two 16-color palettes
i18n.ts      string lookup; tables live in src/locales/

node-pty is native and cannot be bundled by esbuild, nor is it on Obsidian's module resolution path — hence loading it by absolute path out of the plugin folder, and hence the first-run download that puts it there.

Placing the panel uses createLeafBySplit on the most recent leaf of the root split, so it lands under the editor rather than inside a sidebar. Its height is set through setDimension on the leaf's tab container — and on every sibling, because a container left unsized is treated as "as small as possible" and the terminal would take the whole area. setDimension is not public API; if a future Obsidian release drops it, the panel simply opens at the default split height and stays usable.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch
npm run build    # tsc --noEmit + production bundle

./cli/pack_pty_runtime.sh          # build the node-pty archive for this platform
node cli/test_unpack.mjs           # unpack it with the plugin's own reader and verify
node cli/build_hero.mjs            # regenerate docs/images/hero.<lang>.png

Adding a language means one file in src/locales/ and one line in its index.ts. src/locales/zh.ts is the source of truth for the key set — the build fails if any other table is missing a key.

Releasing: tag the commit with the version in manifest.json, attach main.js, manifest.json, styles.css and the node-pty-<platform>.tar.gz archives with their .sha256.txt files.

License

MIT