The overlay built its whole patch as a nested element tree on every frame: a card per file, a header per hunk, six elements per line. gpui notifies the view on each scroll wheel event, so a few hundred lines of diff rebuilt tens of thousands of elements tens of times a second, and the window stalled. Flatten the tree into one row per line in a new `diff_list` module and draw it with `gpui::list`, which builds only the rows on screen. The rows are rebuilt only when what they are built from changes, so scrolling no longer re-splits hunks or re-clones every line, and a change to one file splices just the rows it touched rather than resetting the list and losing the scroll position. The key that decides a rebuild takes the snapshot each frame was asked about even when it matched only by contents. A probe that finds nothing new still lands a fresh `Arc` over an equal snapshot; a key left pointing at the old one would go on walking the whole patch to prove the two equal, once per wheel event, which is the cost the key exists to avoid. A list counts a row it has not laid out yet as zero tall, which left the scrollbar reading an 800-line patch as one viewport: its thumb filled the track, and a drag from top to bottom travelled 248px and stopped. The rows below the fold are counted at the 19px both views already give a line of a patch, through `ListState::with_size_hint` — added to the gpui fork for this, `Cargo.lock` following its `tty7` branch to `ece710e3`. A card cannot survive that flattening — its rows are separate items now — so the frame it drew is gone, and with it the grey header bars and hunk bands that made the overlay the one view in the app still speaking gpui-component's default container language. The rows take the source control panel's own measurements instead: 26px, 10px inset, 5px radius, colour only under the pointer. The title bar's view switch loses its border for the same reason.
tty7
A terminal workbench: persistent sessions, remote work, agents.
Pure Rust · GPU rendering on Zed's gpui · VT core from Alacritty
English · 简体中文
Why
A background server owns your shells and panes — not the window. Everything below follows from that.
- Performance — ~2× the throughput of Alacritty, Ghostty, or Kitty (benchmarks)
- Persistent sessions — quit or reboot; your shells and supported agent sessions keep running, no tmux
- Agent-aware — Claude Code, Codex & co.: status, notifications, and git context for every repo at once
- Scriptable by agents — one agent opens a pane for another, hands off a task, waits, and reads the result, with or without the GUI running
- Editor-grade input — suggestions, completion, highlighting, history search, with no plugin to install
- Remote development — files, repos, panes, and git data stay on the remote machine, over a native SSH stack
- Git beside the terminal — source control, diffs, and worktrees without leaving the window
Install
Native builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux on Releases:
| macOS | …-macos-arm64.dmg · …-x86_64.dmg |
drag into Applications |
| Windows | …-setup.exe · portable ….zip |
|
| Linux | …-x86_64.AppImage |
chmod +x and run — X11/Wayland libraries bundled |
What's inside
| Agent-aware | per-pane detection (19 CLIs) · status dot · notifications · branch + diff · tray icon when input is needed · resume after reboot · tab sidebar grouped by repository |
| CLI + Skills | bundled tty7 CLI · agent skill · run streams a command and exits with its code · split · send · wait --until free · capture |
| Editor-grade input | ghost suggestions from history · explained tab completion · syntax highlighting · multi-line editing · click places the caret · ⌃ R fuzzy history |
| Window | tabs & splits · ⌘ P palette · ⌘ F scrollback search · ⌘ J panel with process tree and listening ports · 13 themes, your own YAML, iTerm2 import · IME |
| Shell integration | injected when a pane starts, nothing to install · prompt marks · working directory · exit codes · command-finished notifications · zsh, bash, fish, PowerShell, WSL, remote panes |
| Remote workspaces | remote files, repos, changes, diffs, worktrees, tabs, and panes · reconnect from any client and continue where you left off |
| SSH | native russh stack: profiles with keychain secrets · SFTP panel · port forwarding · jump hosts · one-time, unprivileged tty7-server install |
| Git | panel follows the focused pane · stage, commit, amend, branch, push, stash · side-by-side or unified diffs · commit graph with cherry-pick, revert, and reset · a new worktree opens its own tab |
Supported agents
Detection is free: brand avatar, branch + diff, tab title.
Status takes one click under Settings → Agents to install that agent's hook,
and brings the status dot, notifications, the tray icon, tty7 wait, and resume
after a reboot. Fork needs both — the agent's own fork command, and the hook
that tells tty7 which session to fork.
The full support matrix, all nineteen
| Agent | Detected | Status · resume | Fork |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Codex | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Grok | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenCode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Oh My Pi | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Droid | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Qwen Code | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Goose | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gemini | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Copilot | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Kimi Code | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Pi | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Aider | ✓ | ||
| Amp | ✓ | ||
| Cursor | ✓ | ||
| Auggie | ✓ | ||
| Hermes | ✓ | ||
| Vibe | ✓ | ||
| Antigravity | ✓ |
None of them are wrapped or proxied — the agent you start is the agent you get,
in a normal PTY, with its own interface. An agent launched through a wrapper
script can be mapped to one by name with agent_commands in config.json.
Documentation
Full documentation lives in docs/ —
keyboard shortcuts ·
config.json ·
CLI reference. The agent-facing CLI interface is also
documented in skills/tty7/SKILL.md.
Install the skill with:
npx skills add l0ng-ai/tty7 # install
npx skills update tty7 # update later
Benchmarks
Same machine, same day, same 155×40 grid — Apple M1 Pro, macOS 26.3.1, five-run averages (2026-07-04):
| tty7 | Alacritty | Ghostty | Kitty | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Plaintext I/O — 11 MB cat (lower = better) |
95 ms | 239 ms | 179 ms | 185 ms |
| DOOM-fire frame rate (higher = better) | 888 fps | 485 fps | 552 fps | 617 fps |
| Cold-launch memory | 116 MB¹ | 105 MB | 128 MB | 130 MB |
¹ GUI 105 MB + the persistent server 11 MB.
Methodology and one-command reproduction: scripts/bench/.
Built on gpui and alacritty_terminal · Apache-2.0 · Discord · Changelog