quick terminal

⌃` opens a shell in a drawer under the session you are looking at, already in that session’s directory. Press it again to close.

It is for the command an agent has just asked you to run: a gcloud auth login, a one-off migration, anything whose output should not land in the conversation. The drawer takes space from the session above rather than covering it, so the message asking you to run the command is still on screen while you type it. Drag the top edge to resize.

What makes it a scratch shell

It has no sidebar row, no number, no group slot and no line in state.json, and it starts with none of the environment Fleet uses to track a session — so nothing you run in it is correlated to a row, summarised, or restored on launch.

It also keeps no shell history and only 400 lines of scrollback. A token pasted in there to keep it out of a transcript does not end up in ~/.zsh_history instead.

Closing the drawer leaves the shell running. A variable you exported is still set when you come back; exit is how you throw it away. Each session has its own, and it ends when that session closes.

When it should have been a session

Start a coding agent in one and a banner offers to promote it: the same shell, the same conversation, the same scrollback, given a row of its own. That row reports no status, because the shell keeps the environment it started with; only an agent started in a real session gets that. Take it — the drawer is deliberately forgetful, which is the wrong place to settle into real work.

The control for the drawer sits along the bottom edge of the session pane, where the drawer opens.