terminal · frame · project

TUIOS

A Go terminal window manager that knows what your agents are doing: tiling, persistent sessions, one Inbox for every agent on every machine.

complementevidence: strongby Gaurav Gosaingithub.com/Gaurav-Gosain/tuios ↗

TUIOS

  • Maker: Gaurav Gosain (individual, open source)
  • URL: https://github.com/Gaurav-Gosain/tuios, https://tuios.dev
  • Status (10 October 2026): v0.9.2, released 9 October 2026. Go, MIT, 5,092 stars. Repository created 6 September 2025; v0.8.0 (27 September 2026) turned it toward agents; v0.9.0 landed 8 October 2026. Pushed to daily. One main author; a bus-factor-of-one project moving very fast.

What it is

A terminal window manager that runs inside your existing terminal: tiling and floating panes, nine workspaces, a vim-style modal interface, a daemon with detach and reattach, sessions on other machines over SSH, and (since v0.8) a layer that knows which pane holds a coding agent and what that agent is doing. Its tagline is “a terminal window manager that knows what your agents are doing.”

The problem it’s solving

Running five or fifteen agents at once in terminals means losing track of which one is stuck on a permission prompt, which finished, and which errored. TUIOS’s answer is one Inbox across every session and machine, answerable without switching panes, plus the plumbing to start, address and coordinate fleets of agents.

Its path / bet

Stay a terminal program (Bubble Tea v2, Lipgloss v2), own every PTY, and add agent awareness on top of a full-featured multiplexer. Be the integration point by being generous with protocols: a JSON control protocol, an MCP server, a tmux shim, a herdr compatibility layer, and OSC 7501 for any program to report status. Win on breadth and polish rather than on one idea.

How it works

  • Window manager. BSP, master-stack and niri-style scrolling layouts; copy mode over 10,000 lines; kitty graphics passthrough (including video), sixel, kitty keyboard protocol, mode 2026. An optional build uses libghostty-vt as the emulator.
  • Daemon and protocol. The daemon speaks line-delimited JSON verbs on the same unix socket the client uses ({"id":1,"verb":"list-windows","params":{...}}). Errors carry a structured hint (did_you_mean, available, the exact CLI command to run): an AXI-style design for agent callers. subscribe streams events; wait-for blocks on agent state.
  • Agent state. tuios integration install wires 19 harnesses to report state; it also detects 24 agent CLIs by process and screen. States: working, needs_input, done, errored, idle.
  • OSC 7501 (Program Status Protocol). Any program writes ESC ] 7501 ; state=blocked:kind=permission:app=terraform:msg=<base64> ESC \ and shows up in the rail and Inbox like an agent. The spec is Superlogical’s (the Rex terminal), revision 0.3 of 7 October 2026; libghostty-vt parses it since ghostty-org/ghostty#14560 (6 October 2026), though the Ghostty app doesn’t display it yet. tuios status working --app build --progress 40 writes it from a script.
  • Inbox and asking. tuios ask-human puts a question with fixed answers in the Inbox and returns the answer; agents mail each other (send-agent-message, ask-agent) with replies from the person marked verified_human. Approvals for Claude Code, opencode and others can be answered with one key.
  • Fleets. tuios fan starts one prompt in several agents, each in a git worktree; start-agent runs a helper in its TUI or headless over ACP or the Codex app-server. Pane grants (read, write, fan, respond, admin) limit what an agent may do through tuios.
  • Read-back. tuios screenshot renders a pane to PNG, SVG, ANSI, HTML or text.
  • Dock components. A dock cell can be any command whose first stdout line becomes the cell, refreshed on events or by polling.
  • Automation. A .tape DSL records and replays sessions; tuios-web serves the UI in a browser; tuios.dev/learn runs the real app compiled to WebAssembly.

Strengths

  • The most complete agent-supervision feature set we found in a terminal tool: Inbox, ask-human, mail, fleets, grants, resume, remote hosts.
  • Excellent agent ergonomics: structured hints in errors, --skill guides, MCP server.
  • Takes protocols seriously (OSC 7501, kitty graphics and keyboard, mode 2026) and is adopting libghostty-vt.
  • Event-driven rendering, zero idle CPU.

Weaknesses / limits

  • One maintainer and a release every few days: the surface is very large for its age and the agent features are about two weeks old. Stability is unproven.
  • 5,100 stars against herdr’s 43,000; it ships a herdr compatibility layer, which suggests herdr set the shape.
  • What it can put in front of a person is limited to panes of terminal programs plus fixed-answer questions in the Inbox. No forms, tables or bound data beyond a dock cell.
  • We did not run it; everything here is from the README, the docs folder and the release list.

Relation to fictty

Complement. TUIOS is the frame; fictty is content in a pane. The overlap to watch is ask-human (a one-question form living in the frame) and dock components (commands bound to cells, the same “data skips the model” idea at a very small scale). If TUIOS grows richer Inbox items (a table to pick from, a multi-field form) it starts doing fictty’s job inside its own chrome.

Could fictty adopt it instead of building?

No. TUIOS manages terminals; it has no UI model an agent can write, patch by id or read back as state. tuios screenshot --text gives text read-back of any pane, which is useful and means “exact text read-back” alone is not unique to fictty: what is unique is the semantic state (get --state) and the data binding. Adopting TUIOS would mean building fictty as a TUIOS plugin in Go against a fast-moving single-author API. Not worth it.

What fictty should take from it

  • Emit OSC 7501 when a screen waits for the person (state=blocked:kind=question), and done when it closes. One escape sequence puts fictty in the Inbox of TUIOS, Rex and (soon) libghostty-vt-based terminals.
  • Copy the error hint shape (did_you_mean, available, command) for the socket protocol.
  • A --skill style self-description an agent can read in one call.
  • Popups: tuios popup -- fictty run ui.json is the natural way to put a fictty screen in front of someone without disturbing their layout; test that path.
  • Note the competition: ask-human is the minimal form. fictty’s form should be clearly better (typed fields, validation, live data), or it should just use ask-human.

Sources