Getting started

Ten minutes from installing to knowing why a session survives closing the terminal.

A termdock session: three named panes, a failed command's exit status shown on its pane title, the session retheme'd live from a command prompt, the settings screen, every pane previewed at once, the jump picker's live minimap, every command the session has run with how it ended, the same commands on a shared timeline, zooming one pane, closing a pane and taking it back, then detaching with the work still running — The whole of this page, in about forty seconds. Each of these is covered below or in Working in a session.

Install

Prebuilt packages and binaries are on the releases page for linux and macOS, amd64 and arm64.

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i termdock_*_amd64.deb

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo rpm -i termdock-*.x86_64.rpm

# Homebrew (macOS or Linux)
brew install padovanl/termdock/termdock

# From source, with Go 1.21+
go install github.com/padovanl/termdock@latest

Check it landed:

termdock --version

Your first session

Run termdock with no arguments. It attaches to a session called main, creating it if it isn't there yet. You get one pane running your shell, and a status bar along the bottom.

Everything termdock does starts with the prefix key, Ctrl-B, followed by another key. Any key you press without the prefix goes straight to the shell, exactly as if termdock weren't there.

If you forget everything else, remember two. Ctrl-B ? opens a scrollable list of every key, always generated from what is actually bound right now — so it stays right even if you rebind things. Ctrl-B d detaches.

Splitting into panes

Ctrl-B v     split side by side
Ctrl-B s     split top and bottom
Ctrl-B x     close the pane you're in
Ctrl-B z     zoom the pane to fill the screen (again to undo)

Move between them with Ctrl-B and an arrow key, or h j k l if you think in vim. Moving is the one thing you do repeatedly, so after a prefixed arrow a bare arrow keeps moving for a second — crossing three panes is Ctrl-B ← ← ←, not the prefix three times.

Closed the wrong one? Ctrl-B Z brings it back, in the window it came from and the directory it was sitting in.

Windows are tabs

A window is a whole separate set of panes, like a browser tab. The strip along the bottom left is the window list.

Ctrl-B c     new window
Ctrl-B n / p next / previous window
Ctrl-B 0-9   jump straight to window N
Ctrl-B ,     rename this window
Ctrl-B &     close the window and everything in it (asks first)

Once you have more than a few, stop counting and start searching: Ctrl-B w opens a type-ahead list of every pane in every window, with a live minimap of the one you're about to jump to.

Detaching: the whole point

Press Ctrl-B d. You are back at your ordinary shell, and termdock says:

termdock: ▦ detached from "main" — it is still running; reattach with: termdock attach -t "main"

Nothing stopped. The panes, the shells, the program halfway through compiling — all of it is still running inside a daemon that is not attached to your terminal any more. Close the terminal window, log out, lose your SSH connection: it makes no difference to the session.

termdock ls                    # what's running
termdock attach -t main        # pick up exactly where you left off
termdock kill-session -t main  # actually end it

This is what a multiplexer is for, and it is worth trying deliberately once — detach, close the terminal entirely, open a new one, attach — because until you have seen it, every other feature reads as convenience rather than as the point.

Where to go next

Every key — the full reference.
Shell integration — one line in your shell rc that unlocks command history, jumping between commands, and copying a command's whole output. Start here if you only read one more page.
Working in it all day — the features that earn their keep once a session has been open for a week.
Configuration — themes, keys, settings you can change while it runs.