Running & Monitoring
An agent is a configuration record, not a running process — nothing about creating or editing one starts anything. Start Shell is the one explicit action that spawns a terminal for an agent, and everything on this page is about what happens once you take it.
Starting a shell
Choose Start Shell from an agent's own page, or by right-clicking its tile in the roster. NEXUS opens a new terminal pane using that agent's configured provider and working directory — a specific CLI if you set one, or a plain shell you type into yourself if you left it on None (bare shell).
Live status
While a shell is running, the agent shows one of these statuses — each rendered as a colored dot alongside a pill carrying its own icon and text label, in the pane itself and on its node in the Neural Map:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Connecting | The session is starting up. |
| Idle | Ready, not currently running anything. |
| Executing | Actively running a command. |
| Interactive | Waiting on you for input. |
| Paused | Deliberately paused; won't proceed until resumed. |
| Exited | The process has ended. |
| Error | Something went wrong. |
Three further statuses — Thinking, Waiting, and Syncing — appear only when the running agent process sends an explicit signal that it's in that state. NEXUS never infers or guesses any of the three from other activity, such as how long a command has been running — without that explicit signal, one of the seven statuses above is shown instead. Don't rely on Thinking, Waiting, or Syncing appearing for a given provider; treat their absence as normal, not as a missing feature.
Paused is set only by choosing Pause Shell yourself (or its equivalent menu-bar command) — nothing else in NEXUS sets it, so seeing Paused always means a person deliberately paused that session, never something NEXUS decided on its own.
The roster gallery shows a simpler, two-state summary instead of the full vocabulary above: a filled dot labeled Running, or a hollow dot labeled Idle. For the full status — Executing, Interactive, Paused, and so on — check the pane or the Neural Map node rather than the roster tile.
Pausing, resuming, ending, and restarting a shell
A pane's own menu offers:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pause Shell | Pauses the session; its status shows as Paused until resumed. |
| Resume Shell | Resumes a paused session. |
| Kill Shell | Ends the process, but keeps its last output on screen rather than removing the pane outright. |
| Restart | Closes the current shell and immediately opens a new one in its place, reusing the same working directory, pane title, and agent identity. |
Restart is the shortcut for when you want a clean process without losing the pane itself — it's a single action, rather than killing a shell and separately starting a new one for the same agent.
Where to go next
- Autonomy modes — the Mode setting that governs how much an agent does on its own once it's running.
- Window & Panes — flipping a running agent's pane between its Terminal and Agent & Skills views.
- Neural Map — an agent's session as a node, and what its status looks like there.
- Notifications Settings — getting notified about a command completing, failing, or a process exiting, without watching the pane.