The prompt
Ghost suggestions, tab completion that explains itself, syntax highlighting, and real multi-line editing.
Nermalputs an editor at the shell prompt. Nothing to install, no plugin to source — the moment a supported shell starts in a pane, the prompt behaves like this.
Ghost suggestions
As you type, the rest of the line is filled in from your history, greyed out ahead of the cursor.
| → | Accept the whole suggestion |
| Keep typing | The suggestion narrows |
| Anything that does not match | It disappears |
Your existing shell history is what feeds it — there is no separate database to build up first, and it carries across sessions and reboots.
Tab completion, with descriptions
⇥ opens a completion menu that knows what it is offering:
- Commands from your PATH and your shell's builtins
- Files and directories, with
cd,pushd,popd, andrmdiroffering directories only - Flags and subcommands with their descriptions, for about 100 common
commands —
git,cargo,docker,kubectl,npm,brewand the rest - Values where a flag only takes certain ones
When Nermalhas nothing useful to offer, the ⇥ falls through to your shell's own completion, so a carefully configured zsh setup is not lost.
To hand ⇥ back to the shell entirely, turn off Settings → Input →
Prompt → Tab completion (tab_completion in config.json).
Syntax highlighting
The line you are typing is coloured as you type it: the command, its flags, its arguments, paths, quoted strings, operators, comments. It is a fast tokenizer, not a shell parser — it never changes what gets run.
Line editing
The prompt behaves like a text field, because it is one:
- Click to place the caret anywhere in the line
- Select with the mouse, drag to extend
- Word motion and word delete
- Undo
Everything readline does still works — this sits on top, it does not replace it.
On macOS, turn on Settings → Input → Keyboard → Option (⌥) acts as Meta if
you want ⌥ B / ⌥ F to move by word instead of typing
∫ and ƒ.
Typing with an IME
Pinyin, Kana, Hangul and the rest work in a pane the way they do in a text field: the composition is drawn in place at the cursor and only the committed text reaches the program.
Two rules decide who gets a keystroke:
- A plain printable key goes to the IME. A key held with ⌃, ⌘, fn, or ⌥ does not — those are chords, not characters.
- A program that asks for every key gets every key. When something turns on the kitty keyboard protocol's report-all-keys mode, the IME steps aside so the program sees raw input.
On macOS with Option (⌥) acts as Meta turned on, ⌥ chords bypass the IME entirely, so ⌥ B reaches your shell as meta-b instead of being eaten as a dead key.
Rendering CJK well is a separate question — see fonts and the two-column grid.
Multi-line commands
A command that wraps, or one you deliberately break across lines, edits in place. The grid shifts to keep the caret visible instead of scrolling the whole screen away.
| ⇧ ⏎ · ⌥ ⏎ | Insert a newline instead of submitting |
| ⏎ | Submit the whole buffer, however many lines it is |
The newline key is rebindable as InsertNewline under Settings →
Keybindings.
Which shells
The prompt features arrive through Nermal's shell integration, which is injected automatically — nothing to add to your rc file — for zsh, bash, fish, PowerShell, and WSL. Other shells (nushell, elvish, xonsh, and the rest) run perfectly well in a pane; they simply do not get the prompt layer.
The integration is also what reports the working directory, the exit code of
each command, and where prompts begin — which is what the sidebar's branch
readout, the "command finished" notification, and Nermalprocs are built on.
Turning it off
Each prompt feature is a switch, and turning one off hands its key straight back to the shell:
| Setting | Key it releases |
|---|---|
| Settings → Input → Prompt → Tab completion | ⇥ → your shell's completion |
| Settings → Input → Prompt → History search | ⌃ R → your shell's reverse-i-search, or your fzf binding |
Giving the whole prompt back to the shell
Turning off Settings → Input → Prompt → Prompt editor
(prompt_editor: false) hands over not one key but the line itself. Every
keystroke at the prompt — printable characters, arrows, IME commits, paste — goes
straight to the PTY, and your shell's own line editor does the editing: zsh's
ZLE, bash's readline, fish's reader. A widget you bound yourself runs exactly as
it does outside Nermal:
# ~/.zshrc — works at a Nermalprompt with the editor off
bindkey '^[[A' history-beginning-search-backward-endWhat you give up is the layer this page describes: ghost suggestions, the completion menu, the fuzzy ⌃ R, the multi-line editor, mouse caret placement and undo on the prompt. Tab completion and history search grey out in Settings while it is off — both are menus Nermalopens inside that editor, so there is nothing left for them to switch.
What you keep is everything shell integration reports: prompt boundaries, the
working directory, exit codes, "command finished" notifications, the sidebar's
branch readout, Nermalprocs. The setting moves the line editor, not the
integration.
It applies to open panes immediately, so there is nothing to restart, and a line you had half-typed is handed to the shell rather than dropped.
Reach for this if the shell's own history traversal matters to you — shared
history between panes, HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS, a prefix search bound to
↑ — or if a plugin you rely on (zsh-autosuggestions,
zsh-syntax-highlighting, atuin) should own the line instead.