l0ng-ai 5b77b51a28 fix(tree-sync): collect the shells a window strands, from a census of its own panes
Closing a tab straight after making it stranded a live shell — six times out
of six, reproducibly. It holds a pty and an fd and runs until the machine
does not. A person cannot type that fast; an agent loop that opens a tab per
task and closes it when the task is done meets it on nearly every iteration,
which is the shape this product is built for.

The rule for judging a pane was already here and already right: one that no
window is showing and no workspace on the machine names is nobody's. Two
earlier attempts failed because of what was put in front of it. Both parked
panes at the *site* that dropped them, and the leak does not live at a site:
a hydration whose whole session is discarded never compares a before against
an after, so its panes were never offered for judgement at all.

So the window now keeps a census of every pane it has brought into existence,
taken at the one point both spawn routes meet, and judges the census rather
than a list of suspects.

The second half is when. The sweep ran only on a landing that rebuilt from a
full machine tree, and the failures do not lead there — a refused operation
calls `desync`, which primes, and a prime pulls this workspace's mirror
alone. Instrumented, the sweep did not run once across three cycles that
stranded three shells. It now also runs after a prime, and pays for the
machine-wide pull only when a censused pane is not on screen anywhere;
while everything the window made is still showing, that is one set
comparison and no request.

Measured against a live window, same reproducer, same machine:

  before   6 create-and-close cycles    6 stranded shells
  after   16 create-and-close cycles    0

and nothing else was harmed: four unrelated panes kept their ids and their
scrollback across ten churn cycles and a GUI restart, which is the failure
this has to be judged on — a leaked shell is recoverable with `pane close
--orphans`, a shell killed under a live window is not.
2026-08-23 09:29:33 +08:00

tty7

tty7

A terminal workbench: persistent sessions, remote work, agents.

Pure Rust · GPU rendering on Zed's gpui · VT core from Alacritty


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tty7 with a tab sidebar of agent sessions across several repos, running Claude Code

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, nushell, 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/.


S
Description
A terminal workbench in pure Rust: shells, persistent sessions, SSH, coding agents. GPU-rendered on Zed's gpui, VT core from Alacritty.
Readme Apache-2.0
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