Driving tty7 from the command line

tty7 is a thin, non-interactive client of the tty7 server. Every verb returns and exits; --json makes the output machine-readable. The GUI never has to be running — the server is what owns the panes.

First: where are you?

tty7 doctor

One table, and it answers everything you need before doing anything else: whether a server is reachable, whether the dialect matches, whether each agent's status hooks are installed, and whether TTY7_CONFIG_DIR / TTY7_WS / TTY7_PANE are set — i.e. whether you are running inside a tty7 pane.

Being inside a pane matters for two reasons: the address-taking verbs (split, send, capture, procs, wait, pane close) default to $TTY7_PANE, and run --keep files its pane into $TTY7_WS. Outside a tty7 shell you must name a target explicitly, and the error will say so rather than guessing.

The hooks row matters if you intend to delegate to another agent: without them an agent reports no status, so tty7 wait on it will only ever time out.

If tty7 doctor says the server is unreachable, stop and tell the user — do not run tty7 server start on your own initiative. Starting a server they didn't ask for changes what their GUI attaches to.

When to use this instead of the Bash tool

The Bash tool is right for anything that starts, does its job, and exits. Reach for tty7 when one of these is true:

• It shouldn't block you. A dev server, a watcher, tail -f, a long test run you want to check on later. Put it in a pane, come back and read it.
• It's interactive or stateful. A REPL, ssh, a database shell, anything where you send one thing, read the answer, then send the next. A pane keeps the session alive between your turns; a Bash call cannot.
• It needs a real TTY. Programs that detect a pipe and change behaviour — colour, progress bars, TUIs, top, anything using raw mode. tty7 run gives a genuine PTY at 120×30.
• The user should be able to watch it. Anything in a pane shows up in their tty7 window, live. That is often the whole point.
• You're being asked about something you didn't start. "What's running in that pane?", "why is port 3000 taken?", "what are my agents doing?" — you can answer those from here without touching anything.
• Someone else should do the work. Another coding agent can run in a pane, and you can wait on it and read its answer. See Handing work to another agent.

Addresses

Re-resolve @N right before you use it; never cache one across a step that creates or removes a tab. Pane ids and workspace ids are safe to remember.

Omitting the address inside a tty7 shell means "this pane" / "this workspace". An explicit address always wins over the environment.

Running a command: two shapes

Blocking, with a real exit code

tty7 run -- cargo test          # streams to your stdout, exits with cargo's code
tty7 run --cwd /path -- make
tty7 run --keep -- cargo build  # leaves the pane as a new tab afterwards

The command's output streams to your stdout as it happens, and tty7 exits with the command's own exit code. This is the closest thing to a Bash call — the difference is the PTY and the fact that the user can see it.

Three things to know. --keep needs a workspace, so it only works inside a tty7 shell or with --ws <workspace>. With --json, the streamed output comes first and the JSON object last — the combined stream is not parseable as JSON, so read the last line. And the pane is 120 columns wide with no way to change it, so output that assumes a wider terminal wraps.

Non-blocking: a pane you talk to over time

This is the one that makes tty7 worth reaching for. Get a pane, send it work, come back later.

PANE=$(tty7 split --v)                  # or --h; splits $TTY7_PANE, prints "%83"
tty7 send "$PANE" 'npm run dev' --enter

split prints the new pane's address on stdout, which is what you capture into a variable. Without an axis it is a usage error — --v stacks the new pane below, --h puts it to the right.

Splitting $TTY7_PANE changes the user's visible layout, which is usually the point: they can watch the dev server you started. Say that you did it, and close the pane when you're done with it.

If you are not inside a tty7 pane there is nothing to split, so make your own place to work first. tty7 new --json /path/to/repo hands you both ids at once — don't go digging through ws tree for the pane:

read -r WS PANE < <(tty7 new --json /path/to/repo \
  | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print(d["id"], "%%%d" % d["pane"])')

send types text into the pane exactly as a keyboard would; --enter appends the carriage return. It does not wait and it does not tell you what happened — reading is a separate step, and waiting is tty7 wait.

For keystrokes rather than characters — Ctrl-C, Escape, the arrow keys — use --key (see Answering a prompt). Typing ^C as text does nothing; it arrives as two characters.

Reading a pane

If you want the screen, use --plain

tty7 capture %83 --plain

capture hands back what the daemon stored — the pane's bytes, escapes and all — and --plain replays them through a terminal grid and prints the resulting text instead. Not a stripper: colour and cursor escapes are gone, but also a line the shell wrapped at column 249 comes back as one line, a progress bar that rewrote itself with \r reads as its final value, and a TUI's screen lands where it was drawn. Use it whenever a human would want to read the output.

Two details about what you get back either way: capture returns a snapshot, not a stream — call it again for a newer one. And by default it prints the newest scrollback segment (the ring splits on resize); --scrollback prints the whole ring, which for a pane that was never resized is the same thing.

If you want the result, redirect to a file

--plain gives you the screen, and a screen is a rectangle: whatever scrolled past the top of a long build log is gone, and the exit code was never on screen at all. So when what you want is the answer rather than the view, have the shell write it somewhere clean:

tty7 send "$PANE" 'cargo test > /tmp/t.log 2>&1; echo $? > /tmp/t.rc' --enter
# ...wait for it to finish (below), then:
cat /tmp/t.rc /tmp/t.log

Complete output, a real exit code, no terminal in the middle.

Knowing when a command has finished

Don't poll the screen and don't write your own loop — block on it:

tty7 wait "$PANE" --until free --changed --timeout 900

free means the foreground command has exited and the pane is back to its bare shell. --changed adds "and something actually ran while I watched", which is what you want on the line right after a send: without it, a command that has not started yet leaves the pane looking finished.

The whole shape, end to end:

tty7 send "$PANE" 'cargo test > /tmp/t.log 2>&1; echo $? > /tmp/t.rc' --enter
tty7 wait "$PANE" --until free --changed --timeout 900
cat /tmp/t.rc /tmp/t.log
tty7 pane close "$PANE"

Exit codes are built for this: 0 means a state you asked for was reached, 124 means the timeout ran out (the timeout(1) convention, so "not yet" is distinguishable from "broken"), 1 means the pane died first.

One trap in --changed: a command that finishes inside a single poll (500ms by default) is never seen running, so the wait keeps going until it times out. For something that quick, --interval 100, or drop --changed and read the .rc file. The timeout message says so when it happens.

If you want the process tree itself — "what is running in there", "which port is this pane serving" — that is tty7 procs %83: indented by depth, * on the foreground process, then the ports those processes are listening on.

Handing work to another agent

Everything above also works when the thing in the pane is a coding agent, and that is where this stops being a terminal wrapper and starts being useful. An agent reports its own status, so you can wait on it rather than on its process tree:

PANE=$(tty7 split --v)
tty7 send "$PANE" 'claude -p "add tests for the parser"' --enter
tty7 wait "$PANE" --until waiting,done --changed --timeout 900
tty7 capture "$PANE" --plain | tail -40
tty7 pane close "$PANE"

Five steps: give it a pane, hand it the task, sleep until it needs you or finishes, read what happened, clean up. The third is the one worth understanding.

What the states mean

--until waiting,done,exit is the default because those are the three that mean "your turn again". Note that idle is something an agent says about itself — a pane running a build is no-agent, never idle, so --until idle is never the way to ask "is the command finished". That is free.

Mixing the two is safe: --until waiting,done,free covers a pane whose kind you don't know, because free is only consulted when none of the agent states you named matched first.

--changed is not optional in a loop

The status is a level, not an event: done stands until the next turn begins. So a wait issued right after a send will happily answer with last turn's done before the worker has even read the input, and you will read a stale screen and think it failed. --changed refuses the state the pane was already in. Every round after the first needs it; the JSON's stale flag tells you when it mattered.

Answering a prompt

A worker that stops at waiting is usually showing something that text cannot answer — a permission prompt driven by arrow keys, a menu, a TUI. Look first, then press keys:

tty7 capture "$PANE" --plain | tail -20   # what is it asking?
tty7 send "$PANE" --key down --key enter  # answer it
tty7 send "$PANE" --key C-c               # or stop it

--key takes enter escape tab backtab space backspace delete up down right left home end pageup pagedown, plus C-<char> for Ctrl and M-<char> for Alt. Repeat it for a sequence; text and keys compose, text first. This is also how you interrupt a runaway command in a pane you own — --key C-c — which plain send cannot express.

Running several at once

Panes are independent, so fan out and then collect:

for task in parser lexer codegen; do
  P=$(tty7 split --v)
  tty7 send "$P" "claude -p 'add tests for the $task'" --enter
  echo "$P" >> /tmp/workers
done
while read -r P; do
  tty7 wait "$P" --until done,exit --changed --timeout 1800 || echo "$P did not finish"
  tty7 capture "$P" --plain | tail -40
  tty7 pane close "$P"
done < /tmp/workers

Splitting repeatedly makes the user's window very busy; tty7 new gives each worker its own workspace instead if you would rather not.

When a worker never moves

A wait that times out while tty7 agents shows a status that never changes almost always means the agent's status hooks are missing or out of date — the worker is fine, it just has no way to say so. tty7 agents names the agent when it can see the gap, and tty7 doctor reports where every agent's hooks stand. Hooks are installed from the GUI's Settings → Agents; tell the user rather than trying to install them yourself.

Looking around

tty7 ls                    # every workspace: tabs, panes, who's attached
tty7 ws tree api           # one workspace as a tree — tabs, splits, panes, cwds
tty7 pane ls               # panes with their workspace, tab, cwd, live flag
tty7 pane ls --all         # + orphans: panes the server runs that no workspace holds
tty7 agents                # every coding agent on the machine and its status
tty7 status                # server pid, uptime, pane count, build, socket
tty7 machine ls            # this machine plus any linked remotes
tty7 events                # stream server events, one per line, until interrupted

tty7 agents is worth knowing about: it reports each pane running a recognised coding agent as idle / working / waiting / done, with the agent's own message beside it. If you are one of them, you are in that list too. It also prints a diagnostic — diagnostics in the JSON — when it can see an agent running whose status hooks are missing or outdated, which is the explanation for any agent that appears frozen.

Add --json to any of these to parse instead of eyeball. -q suppresses output on success but never suppresses errors.

Don't break the user's session

The panes on this machine are the user's real work, and some of them are other coding agents mid-task. Treat anything you did not create as read-only:

• Never send into a pane you didn't open. Keystrokes into another agent's pane, or into a shell the user is typing in, land in the middle of whatever is happening there. Check tty7 agents before you touch a pane. This goes double for --key: a stray C-c kills somebody's work.
• Never pane close / tab close / ws rm something you didn't create.
• Never pane close --orphans. It closes every abandoned pane on the machine, and an abandoned pane can still be running a real command. It is the user's broom; point them at it, don't swing it.
• Never server stop or server restart. Every pane on the machine dies with the server, including yours. If the server genuinely seems wedged, say so and let the user decide.
• Clean up what you did create. tty7 pane close %83 when you're done with a scratch pane; it takes several ids at once. ws rm hangs up the panes the workspace held, so removing a scratch workspace is enough on its own. What does leak is an interrupted tty7 run — that pane keeps running with nothing referencing it, and shows up under tty7 pane ls --all.

Remote machines

-m <machine> routes any command over a link the local server already holds:

tty7 -m devbox ls
tty7 -m devbox run -- cargo test

The name matches the full link key (me@devbox:22) or just the host. The CLI will not dial a fresh connection — if the link is down, or it's a jump/proxy chain, it says so and you should hand that back to the user, who can connect it from the GUI.

Not wired up yet

ws stop, machine connect and machine disconnect exit with a message saying they're not implemented. Don't build a plan around them.

Full command reference

references/commands.md has every verb, subcommand and flag in one table, plus the JSON shape each one emits. Read it when you need a verb that isn't above, or when you're about to parse --json output and want to know the field names.