Slides in from the edge
A full-height panel glides in from the left edge of the screen your pointer is on, or from the right if you prefer. Its width is yours to set, from 420 to 1400 points.
Slidecode · macOS
The terminal that
slides in from the edge.
A menu-bar app for Mac. Swipe in from the edge of the trackpad and a real terminal panel glides over your screen, ready with Claude Code, Codex or your own shell, in light or dark. Swipe back and it is gone, with every session still running.
The idea
Notification Center,
but for your terminal.
Coding agents live in terminals, and terminals live in windows that get buried. Slidecode keeps one a gesture away: a panel that slides in from the edge of your screen the way Notification Center slides in from the other one.
It is a real terminal rather than a chat box. Whatever you would type in Terminal.app works here, with your shell, your PATH and your dotfiles. Claude Code and Codex are one click away because they are only commands, and so is anything else you add.
When you are done, swipe it back. The sessions keep running underneath, and the app you were in gets its focus back.
About the developer →What it does
Small, and made of real parts.
Every capability here is in the 0.1.1 build. The features page dates each one by the version it arrived in.
A real terminal
Each session is a genuine shell in a pseudo-terminal: your login shell, your PATH, your dotfiles, 256 colours and true colour. It is what Terminal.app runs, in a panel.
Claude Code, Codex, or anything
Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode and a plain shell are built in. Add any command, such as aider --model sonnet, and choose which ones open on their own.
One terminal or several
Open as many sessions as you like. Drag a tab onto a terminal to put it beside or below it, and drag the divider to resize. A session whose program exits offers Restart or Close.
Comes back as you left it
The kinds of terminal you had open, their folders and how you arranged and sized them are saved, and are back the next time Slidecode opens. The programs start fresh.
Glass
The panel blurs the desktop behind it and each terminal sits on a translucent rounded card. One Opacity setting runs from see-through to solid.
Tells you when it needs you
A dot on the menu-bar icon and the tab, and a notification, when a session you are not looking at rings the bell, goes quiet after real work, or ends.
Light or dark
Follow the system or force either. The terminal palette changes with it, and every open session is recoloured at once, along with its font and size.
Comes and goes without a fuss
Swipe back, click in another app or press the shortcut, and the panel slides away and hands focus back. Hiding never ends a session: the processes keep running.
Three ways in
A two-finger swipe from the trackpad edge, a global shortcut you can record, or the menu-bar icon. A scroll gesture with the pointer at the screen edge is the fallback.
Lives in the menu bar
No Dock icon and no window to manage. It can open at login, and its menu shows when a newer version has been published.
Notices a clash
macOS keeps a right-edge swipe for Notification Center. Settings warns you when you pick the right edge while that gesture is on, and takes you to the switch.
Ways in
Call it from anywhere.
Send it away the same way.
The panel never takes a Dock slot or a window of its own. It is there when you reach for it and out of the way when you do not.
- 01The trackpad edge
Put two fingers on the left edge of the trackpad and swipe right, the mirror image of Notification Center. The first finger has to land in the outer tenth of the pad and both fingers travel inward, quickly, about a quarter of its width. It is ignored while you type, so a hand brushing the pad does not open it, and so is ordinary two-finger scrolling.
- 02The shortcut
Control, Option and Space toggle the panel from any app, and you can record a different one in Settings. It is a system-wide hotkey, so Slidecode does not have to be frontmost.
- 03The menu bar
Choose Toggle Panel from the terminal icon in the menu bar. The same menu holds Settings, the update check and Quit.
Swiping back toward the edge, clicking in another app, pressing the shortcut or choosing Hide Panel all dismiss it, and the app you were using gets focus back.
Keyboard
The shortcuts.
The panel shortcut works from any app. The others work while Slidecode is frontmost.
- ⌃⌥Space
- Show or hide the panel, from anywhere (changeable in Settings)
- ⌘T
- New session of the current harness
- ⌘W
- Close the current session
- ⌘1–⌘9
- Switch to session 1 to 9
- ⌘\
- Hide the panel
- ⌘,
- Settings
- ⌘C
- Copy
- ⌘V
- Paste
- ⌘A
- Select all
- ⌘Q
- Quit, ending every program (asks first if one is running)
Early release
Read this before
you rely on it.
Slidecode is at 0.1.1. It runs a real shell with your own permissions, so the useful question about it is what it cannot do yet.
- 01The edge swipe uses an undocumented framework
Reading touches at the edge of the trackpad goes through a private Apple framework, MultitouchSupport. A future macOS update could change it. If it is unavailable, a two-finger scroll with the pointer at the screen edge opens the panel instead, and the shortcut and menu bar do not depend on it at all.
- 02Tried on one Mac so far
It was built and run on macOS 27 on Apple silicon. The download contains an Intel slice and the minimum is macOS 14, but neither has been run by hand.
- 03Programs do not survive quitting
Hiding the panel keeps every session running. Quitting Slidecode ends them. On the next launch the same kinds of terminal come back in the same folders and arrangement, but each program starts fresh: a new Claude Code, a new shell, not the conversation or job that was running.
- 04The panel is not resizable by hand
Its width is a setting, and it always takes the full height of the screen it opens on. The terminals inside it can be dragged and resized.
- 05Tabs cannot be reordered
Dragging a tab places that terminal on screen beside or below another; it does not change the order of the tab bar.
- 06It is not sandboxed
Terminals run with your account’s permissions, exactly like Terminal.app. That is what lets Claude Code and Codex work on your files, and why Slidecode is distributed outside the App Store.
- 07It installs no harness
Slidecode runs the claude, codex or other command already on your PATH. If one is missing, the session ends with the shell’s own error and offers Restart.
- 08Some settings apply to new sessions
Theme and font change everywhere at once. The working directory applies to sessions you start afterwards.
- 09Not checked with VoiceOver
Accessibility has not been audited, and the terminal view itself is the SwiftTerm library’s.
Go deeper
Everything it does,
and how to use it.
- Every capability →Grouped, and dated by the version each one arrived in.
- Documentation →Install, call the panel, set up harnesses, every shortcut and every limit.
- Changelog →What shipped in each version, with its checksum and source commit.
Tell me
Found something wrong?
Bugs and ideas are welcome. Send the macOS version, the kind of Mac, what you did and what happened instead. An early release gets better from exactly that.