l0ng-ai e7d04066d2 fix(capture): --plain no longer answers with a fraction of the pane
`capture` offers "two independent choices": how much (`--scrollback`) and
in what form (`--plain`). They were not independent. Every `--plain` grid
was built with `Config::default()`, whose 10,000 scrolling lines were
justified in a comment as "the daemon ring's order of magnitude".

The ring is capped in *bytes* — 8 MiB — which at ordinary line lengths is
nearer 100,000 lines. So the plain form silently dropped most of what the
raw form returned, and `--scrollback` could not bring it back. On a pane
that had printed 120,000 lines:

    capture           8,388,609 bytes, from line 30,764   (the whole ring)
    capture --plain     932,651 bytes, from line 109,973
    capture --scrollback --plain   identical to the above

Nine tenths of the pane missing, with nothing said. `--plain` is the form
the orchestration docs reach for (`tty7 wait %3 && tty7 capture %3
--plain`), so an agent reading the end of a long build log got the tail
and no reason to doubt it had the rest.

The grid is now sized from the segment it has to replay. Counting bytes
per column is not enough and the difference is the bug in miniature: a
line shorter than the pane is wide still costs a whole row, so dividing by
the width under-counts exactly when lines are short, which is most output
— that estimate alone recovered sixty thousand lines and still stopped
twenty thousand short. One row per newline plus one per screenful of wrap
is the bound that holds. Both forms now begin at line 30,764.

Over-estimating is free: alacritty grows its history as lines arrive
rather than allocating up front, and the daemon's ring bounds the whole
thing. Measured: an ordinary capture is unchanged at 8 MB resident and
0.3s; a full 8 MiB ring costs 343 MB for the 2.5s it takes.

The regression test uses short lines for the reason above, and fails
against the old fixed 10k grid.
2026-08-22 23:51:47 +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 (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/.


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