The Terminal Pane
Under the file browser sits a terminal. It is both your own shell on the connected terminal and a live view of what the AI is running, because every command the AI starts gets its own tab next to yours.
It starts collapsed as a single strip labelled Terminal. When commands are running, the strip carries a count of how many. Click the strip, or the chevron at its right, to open it.
The Shell tab
The first tab is Shell: a real interactive terminal on the connected machine, in the same workspace the AI is working in. Type in it like any other terminal.
Closing it with the ✕ on the tab ends that session and leaves a + in its place. Clicking the + opens a fresh shell.
A tab per command
Every command the AI runs appears as its own tab, labelled with the command itself. The dot in front of the label is the status:
| Dot | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Green | Still running |
| Red | Finished with a non-zero exit code |
| Grey | Finished normally, or the terminal no longer knows about it |
Hovering a tab spells the same thing out in words, including the exit code. Select a tab to watch that command's output as it arrives. A command that has produced more output than the pane keeps starts with a line saying earlier output was omitted.
Tabs for commands that have finished carry a ✕ that dismisses them. A running command cannot be dismissed, which is deliberate: the tab is the only place its output is shown. A tab you dismiss stays gone, even though the command itself is still listed by the terminal.
Arrow keys move between tabs while the tab strip has focus, and Home and End jump to the first and last.
Good to know
Dismissing a tab, closing the shell, or collapsing the whole pane changes nothing about what the AI is doing. These are your views of the terminal, not controls over it.
Output is fetched for the tab currently on screen, and only while the pane is open. Leaving a long command in a background tab does not mean its output is being streamed to your browser the whole time; it is fetched when you switch to it.
The pane follows the terminal selected in the chat, the same as the file browser. Switching terminals switches which machine you are looking at.
For self-hosted terminal servers
Open WebUI proxies the interactive terminal over a websocket, and that connection carries X-User-Id and X-Session-Id headers naming the signed-in user and the chat the terminal belongs to. The HTTP proxy has always sent them; the websocket now does too, so a terminal server that scopes sessions per user sees the same identity on both.
Both values are set by Open WebUI from the authenticated session, so a browser cannot choose them.