Terminal Threads Are Live in Zed

Zed's Agent Panel can now host terminals as threads. Start claude, amp, codex, or any other terminal-based workflow, and it becomes a managed thread in your sidebar alongside the rest of your work.

A walkthrough of Terminal Threads in Zed.

When we launched Parallel Agents last month, many of you started running multiple agents at once in the same window. But Parallel Agents only worked with Zed's built-in agent and external agents connected through ACP. We know a lot of you prefer to work with agents in the terminal, and some of you were already making it work with the existing terminal pane.

That workflow made sense, but the terminal pane was not designed for managing parallel agent sessions. Terminal Threads bring those sessions into the same sidebar where Zed already tracks agent work.

How Terminal Threads Work

Open the "New Thread" menu from the + icon in the Agent Panel toolbar and choose Terminal. A new terminal opens in the panel body and appears as its own entry in the Threads Sidebar, just like any other thread.

Each terminal is scoped to your project and worktree. Run claude, amp, pi, or any other process you want. The terminal title in the sidebar updates automatically to reflect whatever is running, so you can tell your threads apart at a glance. You get the same keyboard navigation you use for agent threads, the same notifications when a process needs your attention (see our docs for how to configure them for Claude Code), and you can close the terminal when you're done.

You can open as many terminal threads as you like, and you can mix them freely with Zed Agent threads, ACP threads, or both. Terminal Threads can also be useful for non-agent work. I’ve been using them to keep long compiles and eval runs visible alongside the rest of my workspace.

Keep Your Terminal Workflow in Zed

We built Terminal Threads because Zed should work with the tools developers already use, not only the ones that speak ACP.

A great example of this is Amp, a popular agent that recently announced a rebuilt CLI experience. There's no ACP equivalent of this CLI, so Terminal Threads give anyone who uses Amp and Zed together (such as Amp's CEO!) a much nicer integration than running them side-by-side. For example, if you set the environment variable AMP_FORCE_BEL=1, Zed's Terminal Threads can notify you when an Amp thread finishes.

For Claude Code users, the timing matters. Anthropic recently announced that Agent SDK usage on subscription plans is moving to a separate, limited credit system starting June 15. That makes running Claude Code through ACP significantly more expensive (15-30x more for heavy usage). Terminal Threads are now the only way to keep using Claude Code in Zed with your existing Claude subscription.

What Does This Mean for ACP?

Agents connected through ACP still offer tighter integration with Zed's editing and review workflows. Terminal Threads give you flexibility. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Does this change our investment in ACP? No, not at all. We're continuing to build on ACP and evolve the protocol with our partners, with more impactful work ahead on our roadmap. We still think ACP is the best way to bring external agents into your Zed workflow.

We're all experimenting daily with new ways of agentic engineering, and we want to allow you to bring the tools you need to get your job done.

Get Started With Terminal Threads

Terminal Threads are available in the latest Zed release. Download Zed or update to the latest version to try it.

There is more we can do to make Terminal Threads feel native to Zed. We are starting with the core workflow: terminal sessions that can be created, tracked, revisited, and closed like any other thread. Let us know what's missing or what you'd like to see added by opening a Discussion in GitHub.

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