agterm is live · free · last verified 5 Nov 2026 · viability healthy
agterm
agterm is a native macOS terminal with a scriptable control API for running AI coding agent sessions
The per-session status row plus agtermctl is the entire argument, and it earns its keep once you're juggling three or more agent sessions a day. What you're buying is a minimal terminal with an actual control plane, not a feature-stuffed emulator. Keep your existing terminal installed for everything else.
Verdict generatedVerified 9d ago · liveness 71/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/agterm
- Developers running several AI coding agents who need to see which one is blocked
- Engineers who want to script sessions, layouts, and notifications through a control API and CLI
- Mac users who prefer a minimal, keyboard-driven terminal over feature-stuffed emulators
- Anyone keeping long-running agent sessions alive across restarts and app updates
- Intel Mac or non-Apple hardware, and anyone below macOS 14
- People who want a feature-complete daily-driver terminal with built-in file manager or git UI
- Teams needing collaborative, cloud-hosted, or shared terminal sessions
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Skip agterm if you are on Intel Macs, Linux, or Windows, or you want a terminal that ships every feature pre-built instead of one you extend through keymap.conf, scripts, and the agtermctl API.
The download is free, but you supply your own AI agent subscriptions — Claude Code, Codex, or Pi billing runs separately from agterm.
agterm is free under the MIT license, so the comparison is not price but fit. Against iTerm2 (also free) it trades feature breadth for an agent-status row and a control API. Against Ghostty (free, and the engine agterm embeds) it adds workspaces, overlays, and agtermctl on top. Against paid terminals like Warp, you pay nothing for agterm but also get no hosted service, no team features, and no support contract.
In short
agterm — agterm is a native macOS terminal with a scriptable control API for running AI coding agent sessions. Best for Developers running several AI coding agents who need to see which one is blocked, Engineers who want to script sessions, layouts, and notifications through a control API and CLI, Mac users who prefer a minimal, keyboard-driven terminal over feature-stuffed emulators. Free to use.
What is agterm?
agterm — agterm is a native macOS terminal with a scriptable control API for running AI coding agent sessions. Best for Developers running several AI coding agents who need to see which one is blocked, Engineers who want to script sessions, layouts, and notifications through a control API and CLI, Mac users who prefer a minimal, keyboard-driven terminal over feature-stuffed emulators. Free to use.
agterm is a native macOS terminal built for people who run several AI coding agents at once and keep losing track of which one is stuck waiting on them. Sessions are grouped under named workspaces like "work" and "personal", and each agent reports whether it is active, blocked, or completed onto its own session row, so a screen full of long-lived sessions stays legible. The other half is control. A bundled agtermctl CLI drives the terminal over a local socket: create sessions, type into them, read a pane's text back, run a program in an overlay and capture its exit status, set a session's status glyph, move windows, and post a notification tied to a specific session. An installable skill (Help ▸ Install Agent Skill…) teaches Claude Code or Codex that model, so an agent can build its own layout and show images inline. Status hooks for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, OpenCode and others install from the same menu. Everyday work gets splits (side by side or stacked), a scratch terminal over a session, full or floating overlays that leave the shell underneath untouched, and sidebar companions that pin a log tail, watcher, or HTML page under a session. Live sessions is one of three restore modes: quit, update, or relaunch and your processes keep running, an agent mid-turn included. A session on another Mac can appear as a sidebar row, provided that Mac runs agterm in Live sessions mode over key-based ssh. The defaults are deliberately thin, and that is the pitch. Anything past them is a line in keymap.conf or a cookbook script. It is MIT-licensed, targets Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 or later, and sits alongside Ghostty or iTerm2 rather than replacing them outright.
Key features
- Named workspaces grouping sessions by project or context
- Per-session agent status: active, blocked, or completed
- Status hooks for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, OpenCode and other agents
- agtermctl control API and CLI over a local socket
- Create sessions and type keystrokes into them from a script
- Read a pane's text back programmatically
- Run a program in an overlay and capture its exit status
- Set a session's status glyph from a script or agent
- Post a notification tied to a specific session
- Installable agent skill teaching Claude Code and Codex the control model
- Split a session side by side or top and bottom
- Scratch terminal overlay for quick commands
- Full or floating overlay without disturbing the shell underneath
- Sidebar companions pinning a log tail, watcher, or HTML page under a session
- Three restore modes including zmx live session persistence
Behind the verdict
The problem agterm solves is real and unglamorous: six agent sessions running, four tabs, and no way to tell which one hit a prompt and stopped. Giving every session a row with active/blocked/completed status is a small idea executed well, and it's the reason we'd install this at all. Pick it if you already live in a terminal and your day is spent shepherding Claude Code, Codex, Pi, or OpenCode sessions. The agtermctl surface is the differentiator. Scripting session creation, reading a pane's text back, running a program in an overlay and grabbing its exit status turns the terminal into something your tooling can drive, not just watch. The installable agent skill is the payoff: hand an agent the control model once and it can lay out windows and notify you itself. Pass if you want a daily driver with menus, a file browser, and a git UI baked in. This ships those as lines in keymap.conf or cookbook scripts, and if that sentence irritates you, the terminal will too. Same goes for Intel Macs and anything below macOS 14, and for teams that need shared or cloud-hosted sessions. Against Ghostty, which supplies the embedded rendering engine here, or iTerm2: both are more complete as general terminals, neither gives you per-session agent status or a CLI that addresses sessions as objects. In practice we'd run agterm for agent work and keep the other terminal open for everything else, at least at first. Two caveats worth knowing before you commit. Live sessions, the mode that keeps processes alive across a quit or update, requires zsh or fish as your macOS login shell, so check that first. Remote session attachment assumes another Mac running agterm in Live sessions mode reachable over key-based ssh, which is a nice touch but not a cloud story. The MIT license and $0 price
Limitations
- agterm is macOS-only: Apple Silicon on macOS 14 or later.
- It is not a general-purpose terminal emulator in the feature-stuffed sense — the README says the design is deliberately minimal and covers its set of use cases and stops there.
- You must bring your own AI agent processes (Claude Code, Codex, Pi, OpenCode); there are no built-in AI models and no API access bundled.
- It is early-stage open source, so documentation lives primarily on the GitHub repo (README, ARCHITECTURE.md, a command reference, and a cookbook) and there is no dedicated support team.
- There are no collaborative, cloud-hosted, or shared-session features, and anything past the defaults you build yourself rather than waiting for it to ship.
as of 2026-10-11
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Is agterm still active?
agterm is live · free · last verified 5 Nov 2026 · viability healthy.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is agterm? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: November 2026
How we score →What's new in agterm
Checked todayAcross the latest 1 update: 1 changelog entry.
What do users say about agterm?
What people actually say about agterm — is it worth it?
Our community sentiment research written Jul 5, 2026 is more than 90 days old, so it is being re-reviewed against current data and is not shown.
How we verified this
Every listed fact about agterm — pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 5 Nov 2026. Analysis is drafted with AI models and checked against our editorial standards before publishing; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified agterm 14 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed pricing page
- — changed features, summary, pricing tiers, who should skip it, description, who it suits, our verdict
- — changed pricing page
- — changed features, pricing tiers, our verdict, summary, who should skip it, who it suits, description
- — changed pricing page
- — changed summary, pricing tiers, who should skip it, description, our verdict, who it suits
Showing the 6 most recent of 14 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does agterm cost in 2026?
agterm: Free to use. Pricing last verified 5 Nov 2026.
Plans compared
Every published agterm tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free (Open Source, MIT) | Free | — | Individual developers on Apple Silicon running several coding agents at once who are comfortable extending a terminal through scripts and config files.Adds: Starting tier — the only tier. Everything is included: workspaces, agtermctl, overlays, status hooks, the agent skill, and all three restore modes. |
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where agterm's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
agterm is free under the MIT license, so the comparison is not price but fit. Against iTerm2 (also free) it trades feature breadth for an agent-status row and a control API. Against Ghostty (free, and the engine agterm embeds) it adds workspaces, overlays, and agtermctl on top. Against paid terminals like Warp, you pay nothing for agterm but also get no hosted service, no team features, and no support contract.
Has agterm's pricing changed?
No plan price for agterm has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick agterm?
Pick agterm if you are Developers running several AI coding agents who need to see which one is blocked, Engineers who want to script sessions, layouts, and notifications through a control API and CLI, Mac users who prefer a minimal, keyboard-driven terminal over feature-stuffed emulators, Anyone keeping long-running agent sessions alive across restarts and app updates.
Look elsewhere if you are Intel Mac or non-Apple hardware, and anyone below macOS 14, People who want a feature-complete daily-driver terminal with built-in file manager or git UI, Teams needing collaborative, cloud-hosted, or shared terminal sessions, Users expecting built-in model access — agterm ships no models of its own.
Skip it if Skip agterm if you are on Intel Macs, Linux, or Windows, or you want a terminal that ships every feature pre-built instead of one you extend through keymap.conf, scripts, and the agtermctl API.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas agterm actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You create workspaces like "work" and "personal", start a Claude Code session per repository, and install the status hooks so each session reports active, blocked, or completed on its own row.
Outcome: One glance at the workspace tells you which agent is waiting on a decision instead of cycling through tabs to find it.
You write a short agtermctl script that creates the sessions for a new project, splits the main one side by side, starts the dev server, and posts a notification tied to that session.
Outcome: A single command rebuilds your whole working layout instead of ten manual tabs and splits.
You run a long agent task in a session, choose the zmx restore mode, and quit agterm at the end of the day.
Outcome: The session is still alive when you reopen the app the next morning, with its status glyph intact.
Use cases
- Run several Claude Code agents in parallel, each in its own workspace by project.
- Monitor multiple Codex sessions side by side without losing context.
- Keep long-running agent tasks such as code review or refactoring organized per repository.
- Switch between agent sessions across different client projects by workspace name.
- Persist and restore session state when restarting your development environment.
- Script repeatable layouts with agtermctl for one-click project setups.
- Run a build or test program in an overlay and read its exit status without touching the shell underneath.
- Let an agent post a notification from the session it was working in when it needs input.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of agterm — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Install via Homebrew cask or the signed .dmg: a few minutes to a working general-purpose terminal. Add roughly 15–30 minutes to install status hooks for Claude Code, Codex, Pi, or OpenCode and the agent skill from Help ▸ Install Agent Skill…. Scripting your own layouts and overlays with agtermctl takes longer and depends on how much you read the cookbook.
Switching to or from agterm
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From iTerm2: Keep iTerm2 installed; move agent-heavy work into agterm workspaces and recreate splits with agtermctl rather than importing iTerm2 profiles.
- →From Ghostty: Install agterm as a second app — it embeds the same libghostty engine, so rendering and shell behavior feel familiar, and you add workspaces and the control API on top.
- →From tmux: Map named workspaces to your tmux sessions and translate session/window creation into agtermctl calls, but expect to rebuild keybindings in keymap.conf.
- ↗To iTerm2: Copy your keymap.conf habits back into iTerm2 profiles and rebind splits; there is no export of agterm workspaces.
- ↗To Ghostty: Move shell and rendering work directly since agterm uses libghostty, but you lose workspaces, overlays, and agtermctl.
- ↗To tmux: Recreate named workspaces as tmux sessions and rebuild the status-glyph and notification behavior with your own scripts.
Integrations
Resources & guides
- Resourcegithub.com
Agterm · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
README · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
ARCHITECTURE · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
CHANGELOG · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
CONTRIBUTING · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Documentationgithub.com
Docs · agterm
Full product docs from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
Cookbook · agterm
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourceagterm.com
Home · agterm
Helpful link from agterm.com
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “agterm”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “agterm” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about agterm.
Official links
What are the best agterm alternatives?
The closest alternatives to agterm we list are Harness Terminal, Crush and Omni. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harness Terminal | Free | Free | — |
| Crush | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Omni | Free | Free | — |
Alternatives to agterm
View all
Harness Terminal
Harness is a native Mac terminal for coding agents, with a built-in multiplexer and sessions that keep running after you close the window.
Tools that pair well with agterm
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside agterm, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Harness Terminal
Harness is a native Mac terminal for coding agents, with a built-in multiplexer and sessions that keep running after you close the window.
Crush
Crush: agentic coding in your terminal with multi-model switching and LSP context
Omni
Omni (now Contexere) distils terminal output and folds repeated reads so your AI coding agent burns fewer tokens
agterm vs its closest rival
agterm's closest head-to-head is with Bito.
Our agterm vs Bito verdict written Jul 3, 2026 is more than 90 days old, so it is being re-reviewed against current data and is not shown.
Head-to-head comparisons
Frequently asked questions
Categories
Best-of guides
For makers of agterm
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