Documentation

Install

Download the installer from GitHub Releases and run it. Windows 10 and Windows 11, x64. macOS and Linux are not supported yet.

First launch

A short welcome asks for a theme, a terminal text size and the folder to open first. It appears once. You can walk through it again from Settings, About & Data, Replay welcome.

Your first session

Pick a project folder. OpenTerm opens it as a named session with three terminals already started in that folder. Everything after that is splitting, naming and launching agents.

Updating

OpenTerm checks GitHub Releases at startup and installs signed updates after you confirm. An update it cannot verify against the maintainer’s public key is refused.

Creating one

Ctrl Shift T opens the wizard: name, how many terminals, the starting folder (folder picker or a small navigator terminal you can cd around in), and an optional startup command. Presets for claude, codex, opencode and n8n, or type your own.

Moving between them

Alt 1 - 9 jumps straight to a session. Ctrl Tab cycles forward, Ctrl Shift Tab back. Drag sessions in the sidebar to reorder them.

Status at a glance

Each session carries a dot: an agent is working, an agent is waiting on you, or something errored. You can see which project needs you without opening it.

Renaming and color

Double-click the name or press F2. Session settings hold the name, one of eight colors and the starting directory.

Archiving

Archiving hides a session and stops its terminals while keeping the layout, tasks and remembered agent commands. Restore it from Settings, Sessions & Backups.

The session menu

Session settings, Stats (usage and cost for the whole folder), Git Map, Archive and Delete.

Splitting

Ctrl Shift E splits right, Ctrl Shift O splits down, as many times as you want.

Rearranging

Drag a pane’s title bar onto another pane. Drop on an edge to split there, drop on the middle to swap the two. Drag the dividers to resize, or use Ctrl Alt Arrows.

Zoom and fold

Ctrl Shift Z blows one pane up to fill the session. Ctrl Shift D folds a pane down to just its title bar while it keeps running. Clicking the space a folded group leaves behind fills it with a fresh terminal.

Naming panes

Give a pane your own name, such as api or worker. With four agents running, “PowerShell” four times tells you nothing.

Knowing what is running

The title bar draws the mark of whatever is in the pane: Claude, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Cursor, Grok, PowerShell, cmd, bash, zsh or WSL.

The terminal itself

xterm.js on WebGL, so it stays fast under heavy output. Clickable links, system clipboard copy and paste, and font size on Ctrl = / Ctrl - / Ctrl 0.

One-click agents

The sidebar + menu opens a pane running PowerShell, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Cursor Agent, Grok Build, or a browser.

Recognized CLIs

claude, codex, gemini, opencode, cursor-agent, grok, aider, amp, goose, crush and cline, including when launched through npx, pnpm, yarn, bunx, uvx or pipx.

Resume after a restart

OpenTerm remembers the agent command typed in each pane and replays it on the next launch. Claude Code and OpenCode continue the previous conversation. Claude Code, OpenCode and Codex can reopen one exact conversation by its session id. Switch it off to always start fresh.

Keeping the CLIs current

OpenTerm compares your installed Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Amp and Aider against the published versions. An outdated one raises an inbox item with a one-click update, and panes running it are refreshed afterwards.

Agent updates can only run commands from a fixed list compiled into the app. Nothing an agent prints can talk OpenTerm into running something else.

What lands there

Approval prompts, errors, finished commands, exited processes, due tasks, delegation updates, backup notices, app updates, repos behind GitHub and agent CLI updates. Every item names its session and jumps you to the pane or task it came from.

What counts as a prompt

Real interactive questions: y/n, “press enter to continue”, and the numbered approval menus agents use. Ordinary agent chatter is ignored.

Opening it

Ctrl Shift I, or the bell in the title bar. A pane that is waiting also marks its own title bar.

Readable titles

With an OpenRouter key, a wall of box-drawing and stack trace becomes a short title and one sentence. The raw text stays available on hover, and the naming can be turned off.

Getting your attention

A built-in chime or your own sound file, plus a taskbar flash. Each is optional, and every notification type can be silenced on its own.

Queueing

Ctrl Shift Enter in a pane. The command is typed in as soon as that pane is idle at its prompt again.

Where it works

PowerShell, cmd, bash, and agent CLIs including Claude Code and OpenCode. OpenTerm learns each pane’s prompt from your own typing rather than guessing at it.

Stacking them

Queue several in order: run the tests, then lint, then push.

Rate limits

Panes running Claude Code or Codex show how much of the current 5-hour window is left and when it resets, refreshed every 30 seconds.

Per-terminal detail

“Usage & Costs” in the pane menu breaks tokens into input, output, cache write, cache read and reasoning, with an estimated cost by model and by agent session.

Per-project totals

Session menu, Stats: every agent session ever run in that folder, added up.

Coverage

Claude Code is matched exactly. OpenCode and Codex are matched by timing and folder. History stays with the pane after the agent exits and survives restarts.

Using it

Hold the global shortcut (Ctrl Win by default), speak, release. Toggle mode is available if you would rather not hold.

Tuning it

Shortcut, hold or toggle, a pill or glow indicator and where it sits on screen, start sound, microphone, language or auto-detect, clean or verbatim style, your own vocabulary of project words, maximum recording length, and whether it works always or only while OpenTerm is open.

Polish

Optional: run the transcript through an AI for punctuation and cleanup before it is typed.

Dictation is off until you turn it on, because it arms a system-wide key hook and the microphone. Transcription runs through your own OpenRouter key.

The pane

WebView2 with an address bar that also searches. URL, device and orientation are remembered across restarts.

Capture

The pane records the page’s console messages, JavaScript errors and fetch/XHR requests as they happen.

Handing it to an agent

Alt+drag a browser pane onto a terminal to paste its console and network log there. Alt+Shift+drag sends a screenshot instead. Both can also go to the clipboard.

Device emulation

Real viewport size, pixel ratio, user agent and touch, drawn inside a device frame, with portrait/landscape rotation and a free responsive mode.

The explorer

The Files tab lists the active session’s folder, with a filter and refresh. Right-click for Open in Explorer, Copy Path, Rename and Delete.

Dragging paths in

Drag a file from the sidebar, from Windows Explorer or from the desktop onto a terminal to type its path, quoted when it needs to be.

The code editor

CodeMirror with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, bracket matching, folding, rectangular selection, undo history and search. Ctrl S saves. JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust, C, C++, Java, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, JSON, YAML, XML, Markdown and more.

Markdown, visually

A toolbar editor for bold, italic, strikethrough, code, headings, lists, quotes, links, rules and tables. A file only opens in visual mode if it survives a round-trip unchanged, so your Markdown is never quietly rewritten behind you.

Previews

Images (PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, BMP, ICO, AVIF, SVG), video (MP4, WebM, MOV, MKV, AVI and more), audio (MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, M4A, AAC, Opus), documents (PDF, .docx) and spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .xls, .ods, CSV, TSV).

Freshness check

A background git fetch per session, and an inbox item when your branch falls behind GitHub. It also flags local commits you have not pushed and uncommitted changes.

Review with AI

From that inbox item, open Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode in the session with a prompt already written to review the sync state.

Git Map

From the session menu. A tree of the working tree, branches, remotes, tags, stashes and contributors, with nested branch names becoming folders.

The graph

Commits in branch lanes, with a filter, zoom and copy-sha, ahead/behind counts against upstream, and commits per week for the last 12 weeks. Local git data only.

Find in terminal

Ctrl Shift F, then Enter and Shift Enter to step through matches.

Highlight every match

Ctrl S lights up every occurrence in the focused pane and keeps them lit while you scroll, until Esc.

Open a folder from Explorer

Type OpenTerm into any folder’s address bar, the same way cmd works there, or right-click a folder and choose “Open in OpenTerm”. Closed, it starts with a session for that folder. Open, the session joins the existing window. Already open as a session, it switches to it instead of making a duplicate.

How that is wired

Three current-user registry keys, so it needs no admin rights. Turning it off in Settings removes them cleanly.

Docking outside terminals

Drag a terminal window that was opened outside OpenTerm into a pane to dock it there. Can be switched off.

Taskbar

The taskbar icon flashes when a pane needs you, alongside the sound and the inbox item.

What is kept

Every save also writes a backup to %APPDATA%\com.openterm.app\backups: the last 30 changes plus one snapshot a day, kept for seven days. Saves close together coalesce, so the 30 slots hold 30 distinct moments rather than one busy minute.

Automatic recovery

If the state file is ever missing or corrupt, OpenTerm restores the newest valid backup on startup and says so in the inbox.

The timeline

Settings, Sessions & Backups lists every snapshot with its time, the sessions it held and its pane count. Search it, preview what a restore would bring back or remove, and restore in one click. Your current state is stashed first, so the restore is itself undoable.

Find in backups

Optional, with an OpenRouter key: describe what you are after, such as “the session where I was rewriting the checkout flow”. Only timestamps and session names are sent, never terminal content.

Undo close

Closing a session, pane or task raises an undo toast. The last three closed things can be brought back for ten minutes with Ctrl Shift U.

Terminal text

Font family (Cascadia Mono by default), font size, cursor style (bar, block or underline), cursor blink and pane padding.

Scrollback

8,000 lines by default, adjustable.

Sidebar

Resizable, and hidden entirely with Ctrl B.

Ctrl / opens the cheat sheet over whatever you are doing, so you never have to come back here for one of these.

Appearance

Theme, terminal font and size, cursor, padding.

Terminal

Shell (PowerShell, PowerShell 7, Command Prompt, Git Bash or a path of your own), scrollback, docking outside terminals.

AI & Agents

Resuming agent conversations, AI names for inbox items, your OpenRouter key, and the installed versions of every agent CLI.

Dictation

Everything described under Dictation above.

Notifications

Sound, a custom sound file, taskbar flash, and a switch per item type.

Keyboard

Every shortcut, rebindable, with conflict warnings.

Sessions & Backups

Archived sessions, and the backup timeline.

About & Data

Version and updates, where the state file lives, replaying the welcome, and resetting everything.

Where your data is

Sessions, layouts, tasks, settings and keybinds live in %APPDATA%\com.openterm.app\state.json on your computer, and nowhere else.

When OpenTerm uses the network

Checking for app updates (GitHub), checking agent CLI versions (npm and PyPI), git fetch for the freshness check, pages you open in browser panes, and the optional AI features. That is the whole list.

The optional AI features

Inbox titles, prompt clarification, find in backups and dictation run through your own OpenRouter key. With no key set, nothing is sent anywhere.

Updates

Signed. An update that does not verify against the maintainer’s public key is refused.

License

Source-available under the Elastic License 2.0, public on GitHub. Free, with no account.

Something here wrong, missing or out of date? Open an issue and it gets fixed.