Core concepts
Understand the terminal host, frontend, shell and persistent session.
Four layers, different responsibilities
- Terminal host: the window, fonts, cells, keyboard protocols and terminal selection.
- NMSh frontend: the composer, suggestions, transcript, panels and prompt presentation.
- ShellAdapter and PTY: the shell-specific bootstrap and pseudo-terminal transport.
- Your real shell: parsing, expansion, aliases, functions, environment and jobs.
NMSh is not a terminal emulator, a replacement shell or a multiplexer. It can run inside an integrated editor terminal or alongside tmux without replacing either.
One shell that keeps its state
Changing directory, defining a function or exporting a variable affects the continuing shell. NMSh does not reconstruct shell state after each command. The normal session service can keep that shell alive independently of a window.
The composer is the editable command area. The transcript is NMSh’s presentation of submitted commands and their output. A live session includes an actual running shell. A saved transcript is a record, not a resurrected process.
Frontend actions versus shell commands
/theme is an NMSh action. git status is interpreted by your shell. The complete
NMSh action list lives in /help. Absolute executable paths such as /usr/bin/env
are shell commands, not requests to an imaginary slash-command namespace.
Interactive programs
Fullscreen and raw interactive applications use passthrough. NMSh suspends its own presentation and forwards the program’s terminal interaction. This is why an editor is not expected to fit inside a transcript card.
Compatibility is not universal: terminal protocols, shell plugins and inline redraws have edge cases. The architecture reference explains the real runtime boundaries; troubleshooting helps when an individual tool does not behave as expected.