tty7/docs/features.md

Features

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Input

• Ghost suggestions — your history completes the whole line as you type; → to accept
• Explained tab completion — every flag and subcommand with its description, for ~100 common commands; when tty7 has nothing to offer the Tab falls through to your shell's own completion, and the whole feature can be turned off (Settings → Terminal → Keyboard, or tab_completion in config.json)
• Syntax highlighting — as you type, nothing to install
• Fuzzy history search — ⌃ R shows what you ran, where, and whether it failed; turn it off (Settings → Terminal → Keyboard, or history_search in config.json) and ⌃ R goes to your shell instead, so an fzf / percol binding keeps working
• History from day one — your existing shell history works as-is and carries across sessions
• Line editing — click to place the caret, mouse selection, word motion, undo
• Multi-line editing — wrapped and multi-line commands edit in place; the grid shifts to keep the caret visible. ⇧ ⏎ · ⌥ ⏎ insert a newline instead of submitting (rebindable as InsertNewline); a plain ⏎ submits the whole buffer

In the window

• Tabs & splits — always open in the current directory
• Repo-grouped sidebar — the left tab sidebar groups rows under a header per git repository, non-repo tabs in a trailing Scratch section; branch switches and in-repo cds never move a row (sidebar_grouping in config.json: repo default, none for a flat list)
• Command palette ⌘ P · scrollback search ⌘ F
• ⌘/Ctrl-click links (⌘ on macOS, Ctrl on Windows/Linux) · desktop notifications · copy on select (opt-in, Settings → Terminal → Clipboard)
• Smart double-click selection — double-click grabs the whole URL, file path, bracket/quote pair, or dictionary-segmented CJK word under the cursor; Shift-click extends a selection (toggle in Settings → Terminal → Mouse; word separators via word_separators in config.json)
• Nine themes, plus your own — YAML seed themes with solid, gradient, or image backgrounds; iTerm2 .itermcolors import; in-app color editor with a background-image picker
• Sync with system — Settings → Appearance; pick separate light and dark themes and tty7 follows the OS appearance live (theme_follow_system, theme_preset_light / theme_preset_dark in config.json)
• Window opacity & blur — Settings → Appearance → Window; applies to every theme, Follow theme returns to the theme's own opacity / blur
• CJK / IME input
• Windows Explorer menu — the installer offers Add “Open in tty7” to the folder context menu as a setup task, off by default, and the uninstaller always takes it back out. Writing shell verbs is an install-time decision, so there is no runtime setting; a portable-zip install can do it itself with tty7-app.exe --register-explorer-menu (or --unregister-explorer-menu). Either way the keys land under HKCU, so only your own Windows account is affected

Fonts

• Hack is bundled — it ships inside the binary, so the default renders identically everywhere without relying on a system install
• Primary + ordered fallbacks — font_family and font_fallbacks in config.json; optional font_family_bold / font_family_italic for distinct faces, and font_features to pass OpenType features through (contextual ligatures stay off unless you ask for them)
• Platform-aware defaults — the fallback list names faces the host OS actually ships (PingFang SC / Apple Color Emoji on macOS, Microsoft YaHei / Segoe UI Emoji on Windows, Noto on Linux). Those stock names are appended to a hand-written list too, so a config.json written on another platform still resolves

CJK and the two-column grid

A cell is one advance of the primary face, and a wide (CJK) character is pinned to exactly two of them. A CJK fallback therefore sits flush in its slot only if its ideographs advance twice the primary's Latin advance.

Bundled Hack advances 0.60205em, so a two-column slot is 1.2041em — while every stock CJK face (Microsoft YaHei, PingFang SC, Noto Sans CJK) advances 1.0em. Those glyphs get left-aligned in the slot and the leftover ~0.2em lands as a gap on the right of every character.

Maple Mono NF CN is tried first on every platform for exactly this reason — 0.6em Latin, 1.2em CJK, an exact two-cell fit against Hack. It is referenced by name only, never bundled (~20MB per weight): install it and tty7 picks it up with no config change.

For CJK set tight rather than merely even, change the primary face instead — one that advances 0.5em (Sarasa Mono SC, say) makes two columns exactly 1.0em.

Coding agents

tty7 recognizes third-party coding agents running in a pane (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Aider, Amp, OpenCode, and ~12 more) and adds around them — it never wraps or replaces the agent.

• Brand avatars — the tab chip / sidebar row shows which agent runs where; custom wrappers map in via agent_commands in config.json
• Status dot — working (blue) / needs your input (amber) / done (green), driven by agent-reported events over an OSC channel; Settings → Agents installs the hooks that feed it (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, OpenCode, Pi, Grok Build, Oh My Pi)
• Notifications — "needs your permission…" the moment an agent blocks on you, and "finished after Ns" per turn, honoring your notification policy
• Branch at a glance — each sidebar row shows its pane's git branch and working-tree diff (+N −M), refreshed on cd and when a command finishes; clicking the counts opens the diff overlay, and turning that off (Settings → Window & Tabs, or sidebar_diff_preview: false in config.json) keeps the readout while making it non-clickable
• Session resume — panes lost to a reboot re-launch their agent conversation on restore, carrying the original launch flags (claude --dangerously-skip-permissions --resume …) (restore_agent_sessions, on by default)
• Fork session — branch a live agent conversation into a second, independent one by shelling the agent's own fork command (codex fork <id>, claude --resume <id> --fork-session, also OpenCode, Grok Build, and Oh My Pi); the original is untouched and both continue separately. Right-click a pane to pick a split placement, or right-click the tab / sidebar row to open the fork in a new tab. Needs the agent's hooks installed, since the fork targets the session id they report; a remote pane can't fork, because the command would run against the local agent — and note a fork copies the whole transcript, so repeated forking costs real disk in the agent's own session store
• Copy Session ID — put the agent's native session id on the clipboard, beside Copy Working Directory, for pasting into codex resume, a bug report, or another tool
• Context feed — palette commands send the current selection or the repo's git diff to the running agent as a ready-made prompt
• Tray icon — a system tray / menu bar item that flips to an attention state the moment any agent needs your input; its menu lists every agent pane (brand avatar + status dot, click to reveal), switches the notification policy, and offers Quit and Stop Daemon alongside the plain session-keeping quit (show_tray_icon, on by default)
• tty7 wait — the CLI's orchestration primitive: block until a pane's agent needs input or finishes its turn (tty7 wait %3 --until waiting,done --changed --timeout 600, exit 124 on timeout), so one agent can sleep until its peer blocks on a permission prompt instead of screen-scraping — then tty7 capture %3 --plain to read the result. The agent status is a level, not an event, so --changed ignores the state the pane was already in when the wait began; without it, the JSON's stale flag says whether the answer might belong to the previous turn
• Orchestration skill — a switch (Settings → Agents) that installs a Claude Code skill (~/.claude/skills/tty7-orchestration) teaching a primary agent the delegation loop — spawn a worker pane, send it a bounded task, wait on it, capture the result. A skill rather than a global instruction on purpose: only its one-line description rides in context until explicitly invoked, and worker agents never inherit orchestration authority
• tty7 on PATH — the CLI ships inside every installer and is put on PATH at launch, so a script or a coding agent can drive tty7 from any terminal. Inside a tty7 pane it works regardless, since panes inherit the app's environment. On Unix it is a symlink into whichever of /opt/homebrew/bin, /usr/local/bin, ~/.local/bin, ~/bin, ~/.cargo/bin your PATH already covers; on Windows the install directory is appended to your user PATH, and the uninstaller takes it back out. A tty7 you installed yourself is left alone, never replaced. Off via Settings → Agents or install_cli_on_path: false in config.json

SSH

A native Rust SSH stack (russh) is the only path — profiles, credentials, and SFTP without shelling out to ssh. There is no system-ssh compat mode.

• QuickConnect — type user@host[:port] in the palette and connect; IPv6 [::1]:port supported
• Saved profiles — full connection config with passwords / passphrases in the OS keychain, never on disk
• ~/.ssh/config aliases — type one to connect (resolved natively — common fields, best-effort — over russh), or import them as profiles in Settings
• GUI auth — in-pane sheets for password, key passphrase, 2FA, and host-key confirmation (new vs. changed)
• Built-in SFTP — a slide-in file panel: browse, upload / download, rename / delete / chmod, drag to Finder
• Port forwarding — Local / Remote / Dynamic, preconfigured or added live, plus ⌘/Ctrl-click localhost:PORT to auto-forward
• Jump hosts & proxies — multi-hop via profile references or ProxyJump, ProxyCommand, SOCKS5 / HTTP

Entry point	Connects via
Saved profiles · QuickConnect · typed user@host[:port]	Native russh — SFTP · keychain · GUI auth · L/R/D forwards
~/.ssh/config aliases	Resolved natively, then russh (Match/canonicalize/GSSAPI unsupported — no fallback)

Keybindings

Keys are shown in macOS notation — on Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl. The essentials:

⌘ T · ⌘ W · ⌘ ⇧ T	new tab · close tab · reopen closed tab
⌘ 1…⌘ 9 · ⌃ ⇥ · ⌃ ⇧ ⇥	jump to tab 1–9 · next tab · previous tab
⌘ D · ⌘ ⇧ D	split right · split down
⌘ ] · ⌘ [	next pane · previous pane
⌘ ⌥ ←→↑↓	focus the pane in that direction
⌘ ⏎ · ⌘ ⇧ ⏎	toggle fullscreen · maximize / restore the pane
⌘ K	clear the screen and scrollback
⌘ P	command palette
⌘ F	search the scrollback
⌃ R	fuzzy-search shell history
⌘ + · ⌘ − · ⌘ 0	font size up · down · reset

Settings → Keybindings (⌘ ,) lists every shortcut. Click one, press the new keys (Esc cancels, Backspace resets to default), and it takes effect immediately. Pane resize and swap have no default keys — bind them here or run them from the command palette.

tmux preset — remaps pane/tab actions onto a prefix (default ⌃ B): ⌃ B C opens a tab, ⌃ B % splits, ⌃ B then an arrow moves focus. A bare prefix reaches the shell after a brief pause; prefix + an unbound key passes straight through.

Performance notes

• The PTY is read at device speed and parsed in large batches, off the render path
• Hot paths are lock-free — a big cat never waits on drawing
• The daemon buffers up to 16 MiB ahead of the window before backpressure applies

macOS privacy

Panes are forked from the bundled executable, so macOS attributes a program's request for a protected resource to tty7.app. tty7 declares the matching TCC usage strings (camera, microphone, contacts, calendar, reminders, photos, location, local network, Bluetooth, speech recognition, Apple Events, system administration) so that program gets the normal one-time prompt instead of being denied outright with no prompt at all.

Not covered by usage strings:

• Full Disk Access — Apple defines no usage-string key for it. Reaching ~/Library/Mail, ~/Library/Messages, ~/Library/Safari or ~/Library/Containers needs a manual grant in System Settings.

Declaring a usage string is not the same as holding the permission: tty7.app itself is granted none of these resources. Every prompt you see belongs to whatever you ran in the pane, and you can revoke it under Privacy & Security.

Localization

The GUI ships English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese strings. Pick one in Settings → Appearance → Language, or in config.json:

{ "gui_language": "zh-CN" }

en, zh-CN and ja-JP are the only accepted values; anything else falls back to en. The choice is explicit — the system language is never inferred. CLI output stays English so agent and script integrations keep a stable, predictable surface.