Desktop terminal access should behave like an IDE: active project sessions open a bottom panel in the session working directory while keeping a full terminal tab available for dedicated use. The panel has constrained resizing and cleanup so session tab state remains isolated, and terminal guidance points users to the bundled claude-haha command for extension setup.
Constraint: Desktop bundles the user-facing CLI as claude-haha while claude-sidecar remains internal
Rejected: Always opening a standalone terminal tab | loses the current project context and diverges from common IDE behavior
Rejected: Exposing claude-sidecar in terminal guidance | it is an internal launcher, not the supportable user command
Confidence: high
Scope-risk: moderate
Directive: Keep bottom terminals keyed by session id and pass session workDir/projectPath into spawned terminals
Tested: bun run check:desktop
Tested: git diff --check
Tested: Computer Use E2E against built macOS app during implementation
Not-tested: bun run quality:pr is blocked by existing branch policy requiring allow-cli-core-change approval
Some setup flows end in a shell command instead of a natural-language install path, so Settings now exposes a host PTY terminal backed by portable-pty and xterm. The terminal inherits the user's login-shell environment, forces a UTF-8 locale when needed, and preserves split UTF-8 output so Chinese paths render correctly.
Constraint: Desktop GUI apps do not inherit the user's interactive shell PATH on macOS.
Constraint: Command output may split UTF-8 characters across PTY reads.
Rejected: Use Tauri shell commands only | users need an interactive PTY for copy-pasted install flows.
Rejected: Ask users to edit shell profiles | terminal setup should work out of the box.
Confidence: high
Scope-risk: moderate
Directive: Keep terminal startup tied to host environment checks; do not bundle runtimes to solve PATH issues.
Tested: cargo fmt --check; cargo test --lib; cargo check; cd desktop && bun run lint; cd desktop && bun run test src/pages/TerminalSettings.test.tsx; cd desktop && bun run build; cd desktop && bun run build:macos-arm64
Tested: Computer Use verified npm is available in the built macOS app terminal and Chinese output renders after UTF-8 decoding fix.
Not-tested: Native Windows/Linux package runtime validation.
