Terminal, Desktop, and Portal

Each thread runs in its own Orb, a Linux sandbox. Besides Files and Changes, the thread’s right pane has three ways into that Orb. They need the dx Orb image from v0.2.22 or later; see Requirements.

Terminal

The Terminal is a tmux session that you and the agent share. Ask the agent to run something in your terminal, or to look at what you ran, and it uses the same session. Windows and panes work as in any tmux. The scroll wheel scrolls tmux’s history; hold Shift to select text in the browser.

The session lives in the Orb, not in the browser or in dx’s daemon: closing the tab, a network drop, or a dx update keeps your shell and its running commands.

Desktop

The Desktop tab streams a Linux desktop from the Orb, with Chromium and a terminal. Click into it to type and use the mouse. Text copied on the desktop reaches your own clipboard only right after your own key press or click there, so nothing in the Orb can replace your clipboard on its own.

• The agent can open pages in the same Chromium and drive it, so you can watch or take over.
• The desktop streams only through your signed-in dx session, and only to the thread’s owner and contributors. Viewers see a note instead. An archived thread’s Desktop does not start.
• It connects while the tab is shown. After you switch tabs or collapse the pane it stays connected for a minute, so coming straight back is instant.
• After five minutes without input it pauses so the Orb can sleep; choose Resume to continue. Chromium and its tabs keep running in the Orb.
• There is no GPU: WebGL works through software rendering, and full-screen animation is slower than on a local machine.

Portal

When the deployment has a Portal domain, a web app the agent or you start in the Orb is reachable at https://t-<thread>-p<port>.<portal domain>/ behind dx sign-in. The Portal tab lists the ports listening in the Orb and opens them. A thread’s owner can make up to three ports public at once, each for 1 hour, 1 day, or 7 days, and revoke them at any time; public visitors see a notice first and get no access to the thread. Without a Portal domain the Portal tab is hidden, and the agent shows running apps in the Desktop’s Chromium instead.

Declare a dev server you keep using in .dx/services.yaml so a Portal request starts it again after the Orb wakes:

services:
  web:
    command: pnpm dev --host 127.0.0.1 --port $PORT
    port: 5173
    cwd: apps/web # optional

When the Orb sleeps

An Orb pauses five minutes after the last activity, and wakes on the next message, Terminal, Files, Desktop, or Portal request. Sleeping keeps memory on E2B and Freestyle, so running processes continue where they stopped. On Cloudflare Containers and Docker Cloud Sandboxes the files stay and processes start again.

Activity	Keeps the Orb awake
The agent running a command	While it runs, then five minutes
Typing in the Terminal	Five minutes from the last key
A command running in the Terminal	Up to five minutes after the Terminal or agent was last used
The Desktop in use	Until five minutes without input, then five minutes
A Portal request	Five minutes from the request
A server listening, unused	No

A forgotten dev server, build, or Desktop tab therefore keeps an Orb awake for about ten minutes, not indefinitely.

Requirements

The Terminal’s tmux and the Desktop come from the dx Orb image. A self-host on E2B must rebuild its template after upgrading to v0.2.22 (pnpm deploy:selfhost:template, then deploy); Cloudflare Containers deploys build the image themselves. A thread created before that keeps its sandbox: its Terminal is a plain shell and its Desktop says it is not available.