Terra
A terminal your agents can drive.
Browser-style tabs in a clean, dark window. Your coding agent opens tabs, types into them and reads them back — while you watch the same tabs live.
Install
macOS and Linux, from a terminal:
curl -fsSL https://terra-tools.github.io/terra/install.sh | shInstallers are on the releases page
too: .dmg on macOS, -setup.exe on Windows, .deb on Linux. Not signed yet —
macOS: right-click → Open on first launch; Windows: click through SmartScreen.
Why
Agents run long commands somewhere you cannot see. Terra gives them a real window instead: every command lands in a tab you can watch, scroll back and take over at any moment. Nothing is hidden in a log file, and nothing needs a second terminal multiplexer on top.
- Tabs, not panes. Titles, icons and
⌘1–⌘9, the way a browser does it. - Driveable. Anything on your machine can open a tab, send keystrokes and read the screen back.
- Yours. Free, open source and local — no account, no telemetry.
Selecting text
Inside tmux (with set -g mouse on), a plain mouse drag works the way it
does in Ghostty: tmux makes the selection, and on release it copies it to the
macOS clipboard through OSC 52 — over ssh too, which is otherwise a one-way
street. Stock tmux needs no other configuration for this. Add
set -s set-clipboard on to your tmux.conf if you also want programs inside
tmux (vim, an agent) to reach the clipboard the same way.
Other programs that take the mouse — vim on its own, claude code, codex —
receive every click themselves and copy nothing back, so a plain drag inside one
selects nothing. Hold ⇧ Shift (or ⌥ Option) while dragging to select in
Terra itself, then ⌘C to copy. That works in every program, tmux included.
Splits and the mouse
Split the window (⌘\) and the pointer picks the pane: move the mouse into a
terminal and it takes the keyboard — no click first. A resting cursor never
does, so panes can split, resize and scroll under it without the keyboard
moving, and a drag that crosses into the neighbour stays with the pane it
started in. Set focus_follows_mouse = false under [input] in
~/.terra/config.toml for click-to-focus only.
The wheel always scrolls the pane you are pointing at, whether or not it holds the keyboard — including inside a full-screen program that handles its own scrolling.
Docs
- Using Terra with agents — the block to paste into your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md
- Architecture — how the app, the CLI and the protocol fit together
- Development — building, testing and packaging from source
- Configuration — the settings file in
~/.terra/config.toml
License
MIT