tuios v0.8.0

tuios v0.8.0 is out. It is the first release since v0.7.0 in March, and the release notes have everything in it, with a short clip for each part. This post is why the release looks the way it does.

What changed in how I work

For most of this year I have had three or four coding agents running at once, each in its own pane: one on a refactor, one writing tests, one reading a bug report. The panes were fine. What broke down was me. An agent would stop on a permission prompt, paint it once and go quiet, and I would not notice for twenty minutes because it looked exactly like an agent that was thinking. Another would finish and sit there with its answer while I watched a different pane.

A terminal multiplexer knows a lot about a pane: its process, its output, its title, its directory. It did nothing with any of it. So most of v0.8.0 is tuios learning to tell those moments apart and telling you about them.

What v0.8.0 does about it

Every agent pane has a state. tuios recognises 23 agent CLIs, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and opencode among them, and gives each pane one of working, needs input, finished, errored or idle. The rail lists every agent in every session, with the ones that need you at the top. The best source is the agent reporting its own state through a hook, and tuios integration install --all sets that up for every harness you have. Without hooks, tuios reads the transcript, the title and the screen, and ranks what it finds so a guess never overrides a report.

One Inbox for everything that waits. ctrl+b i opens a list of every permission prompt, question, message and finished turn in every session. You can read a blocked prompt and answer it from there without going to the pane. Approvals can be held for you, and one that matches a risk rule, such as a force push or a recursive delete, needs a second press.

A review before you keep anything. ctrl+b v shows the git diff of what an agent changed, and you can leave notes on lines and send them back as one message. tuios fan runs one prompt in several git worktrees at once, and the review compares the attempts side by side.

Sessions come back. Your sessions live in a daemon now. A detach loses nothing, and after a restart or a reboot the daemon brings back each session's layout, window names and directories, with a fresh shell in each pane. If the agent's harness can resume a conversation, tuios offers to do that too.

Panes on other machines. Add a machine with tuios hosts add, and you can attach a session there or open a single pane there, drawn by your local tuios with your own keys. It runs over plain ssh. A dropped link no longer kills the pane.

The parts you do not see

A full scrollback used to cost 48MB per pane. It costs 4.2MB now. Startup to the first frame went from 566ms to 68ms, and the binary lost 6MB. The terminal emulator got a conformance suite, a fuzzer and a second backend, libghostty-vt, and those found bugs a program in a pane could hit: a cursor report with its row and column swapped, hyperlinks that never worked, and a scroll region that could take down the daemon with every session in it. I wrote about several of these on the blog.

The interface was also redrawn for the terminal you actually have. It is designed separately for truecolor, 256 colours and 16 colours, it reads properly on light themes, and with no theme set it takes its colours from your terminal.

If you already use tuios

Read Install or upgrade before you upgrade. The short version: run tuios kill-server once, because the new client will not talk to the old daemon, and note what you want to keep first, because v0.7.0 saved nothing. An existing config file keeps running tuios without the daemon until you add daemon = true under [startup]. A few keys changed too: plain ctrl+v now goes to the program in your pane, and alt+arrows move between panes.

Try it

brew install tuios

Or the install script, the AUR, Nix, Go or Docker, all on Getting started. If you want to feel it out first, Learn tuios runs the real thing in your browser with a pretend shell.

Eight people besides me sent changes in this release, and many more filed issues and ran builds from main. Thank you. If tuios gets an agent's state wrong, or your agent CLI is not on the list, open an issue on GitHub. That is the part I most want to hear about.