# Terminal Mode

Terminal Mode runs Claude Code as CLI inside your workspace, instead of Polyscope's chat view. You get the complete Claude Code experience — slash commands and the interactive TUI — with Polyscopes powerful tooling wrapped around it.

It applies to **Claude** workspaces. Codex and other agents always use chat.

![A Claude workspace running in Terminal Mode](/images/docs/terminal-mode.png)

**Note:** Terminal Mode is different from the extra **terminal panels** you can open and from [Bash Mode](/docs/digging-deeper/bash-mode). Those run your *shell*; Terminal Mode runs the *agent itself* as a CLI.


Both run the same agent against the same workspace clone — Terminal Mode only changes *how* you interact with it.

## Turning it on

If you want to use Terminal Mode as the default interface for **newly created** Claude workspaces, set globally:

1. Open **Settings → Coding Agents**.
2. Set **Claude Interface** to **Claude Terminal**.

New Claude workspaces you create from then on open in Terminal Mode. Existing workspaces keep the mode they were created with.

## Working in a terminal workspace

A Claude workspace in Terminal Mode opens a Claude Code CLI terminal. Type your prompts **directly in the terminal** — the prompt composer is disabled for these workspaces, since the CLI handles your input.

Everything else in Polyscope keeps working around it: the workspace's activity, waiting, and completion states update as Claude runs, and merging, linking workspaces, and run scripts all behave as usual.

## Permissions

By default, Claude Code's own permission prompts apply — Claude asks before running tools, just like the CLI does in your own terminal.

To skip them, turn on **Skip permission prompts** under **Settings → Coding Agents**. This auto-approves tool calls (the same behaviour chat mode always had). Leave it off to keep Claude's prompts and approve actions yourself.

This setting is **host-local**: it lives on the machine running Polyscope and can only be changed from the desktop app there. On web and mobile it appears as read-only.

## Reviews

When Terminal Mode is on, starting a [Review](/docs/digging-deeper/review) opens its **own** Claude Code terminal session, separate from your main one. The review terminal keeps its own history and model, so the review conversation never mixes into your implementation thread.

## Restarting a session

If the Claude CLI exits — you quit it, or it crashes — Polyscope shows a prompt to bring it back. You can also restart at any time from the command palette: open it with **⌘K** and run **Restart Claude session**. Restarting resumes the previous conversation.

## Platform support

Terminal Mode runs on **desktop, web, and mobile**, across macOS, Windows, and Linux remote machines. On web and mobile, the terminal streams live from the machine running Polyscope.