The comment here already has the right analysis: panes stranded by a refused operation are the minority path, the other two throw their panes away without a refusal, and the sweep belongs after a hydration settles rather than at any one failure. Two things it did not say, both now measured. The scale and the severity. 160 CLI operations against a live window left 17 orphans, and every one was a live `zsh` — not a stale record — each holding a pty and its descriptors. `tty7 pane close --orphans` ended all 17, so the documented recovery does work. And a dead end, written down so nobody spends the evening on it twice. Parking the pane here rather than only warning — handing it to the `sweep_parked` that already exists, which judges against the whole machine's freshly pulled tree and spares anything a live view shows — is safe, and does not measurably help. Four runs: of the panes that reach this arm, 33–60% were still orphaned at the end without it and 43–50% with it. They are mostly already caught by the sweep the layout rewrite arms. The leak lives in the two paths that never refuse an operation, exactly where this comment says the fix belongs. No behaviour change; the experiment was backed out.
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, 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/.
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