l0ng-ai dbef42a03d fix(machine): keep earlier generations of the machine tree (#716)
`MachineStore::persist` serialises the whole document and lands it with
`write_atomic_private`, so the file on disk is never torn — but the document it
replaces is simply gone. The tree is rewritten whole on every mutation, which
means the write that loses a layout is also the write that erases the only copy
of it. That is what turned #716 from an annoyance into a lost afternoon: a
client's arrival queued nineteen `TabClose`s, each one persisted, and by the
time anyone read `machine.json` there was nothing anywhere on the machine that
remembered what the workspace had looked like.

`persist` now rotates the document it is about to replace into a small ring of
backups beside it — `machine.json.bak`, then `.bak.1` and `.bak.2` behind it —
before the new one is written.

Two things decide whether such a ring is worth anything. The first is what
"previous good" means. It cannot mean "the last document that parsed": an
emptied tree parses perfectly and is exactly the state you want to recover
*from*, so validity is no signal at all. Age is the only signal available, so
the ring is spaced: a generation is taken only when the newest one is at least
five minutes old. Without that spacing the failure mode above — a burst of
writes seconds apart — would have rolled three copies of the damage through the
whole ring before a human noticed. With it, the oldest generation is a quarter
of an hour of history, and three generations is where the ring stops so a file
rewritten every few seconds does not grow a history without bound.

The second is the atomicity of the rotation itself, since a rotation that can
lose both copies is worse than none. The live file is never renamed, only read:
at every point in `keep_a_generation` the tree is still completely at its own
path, and the new generation lands through `write_atomic_private` — a sibling
temporary renamed into place, which also means the copies inherit the 0600 the
live tree is written under rather than widening anything. A crash mid-rotation
costs at most one backup generation and never the tree. A backup that cannot be
written is logged and the new document is persisted anyway; a machine with no
backup still has to work.

`load_machine` now also falls back to the newest generation that parses when the
live document is unreadable or corrupt, instead of starting from an empty tree.
Deliberately only for those two cases: a tree that parses always wins, however
empty it is, because that is the case a human has to judge — which is why the
files are plain JSON under obvious names, ready to be copied back by hand.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UUyWQXzcBAoBzaSX8pc7nU
2026-09-09 18:00:28 +08:00
2026-09-07 21:00:55 +08:00

tty7

tty7

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

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


CI Version Platforms License Discord

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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 (20 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 twenty
Agent Detected Status · resume Fork
Claude Code
Codex
TraeCode
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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