termdock

Why termdock

The everyday work of a multiplexer — splitting, switching, detaching, coming back — done without a plugin manager, a config file you have to write first, or anything else installed alongside it.

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Detach and it keeps going

The session lives in a daemon, not in your terminal. Close the window, drop the SSH link, reboot your laptop — reattach and everything is where you left it.

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Nothing underneath

Not a wrapper around tmux. It drives the pseudo-terminals itself and emulates VT100 with scrollback for every pane, in one static binary.

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Batteries included

Eleven colour themes, a git segment, pane logging, session persistence — compiled in. tmux wants a plugin manager and four plugins for the same list.

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Configure it while it runs

Every setting is editable from inside a live session and takes effect immediately — saved back to your config only when you ask.

Beyond splitting a terminal

Things tmux either doesn't do, or needs a plugin for — here they're just a keypress away.

Fuzzy jump picker

Ctrl-B w. Type to filter every window and pane in the session, with a live minimap of the one you're about to jump to — so you pick by what's in a pane, not by remembering its number.

Live pane overview

Ctrl-B g. Every pane in the whole session at once, as a grid of live thumbnails. Arrow to one and press enter, or just click it.

Survives a reboot

Layout and each pane's working directory are snapshotted continuously and rebuilt next launch — no plugin. A session that ends on purpose cleans up after itself; only a crash leaves one to recover.

Floating popup

Ctrl-B P. A scratch terminal over whatever you were looking at. Hiding it doesn't kill it — the shell inside carries on, and comes back exactly as you left it.

Reopen a closed pane

Ctrl-B Z. Brings back the pane you just closed — same window, same working directory — however it went: x, or an exit typed into the wrong one. In tmux a closed pane is simply gone.

Name your panes

Ctrl-B . Six panes all called "bash" tell you nothing. Give one a name and it wins over the process name, shows up in the jump picker, and survives a crash.

Type into the panes you choose

Ctrl-B y, or space in the overview to pick exactly which. tmux's synchronize-panes is all-or-nothing over a window — the pane you need to keep out has to be moved elsewhere first.

Saved layouts

termdock layout save dev / apply dev. Windows, splits, ratios, names and each pane's directory, rebuilt on demand — the job people currently leave for tmuxinator and a YAML file.

Crash recovery that remembers

Layout, working directories and the last 200 lines of each pane, snapshotted continuously. You reopen looking at the stack trace you were reading. tmux needs tmux-resurrect for the layout alone, and even that brings back nothing of the contents.

Search every scrollback

Ctrl-B /. One search across every pane's history in every window, plain text or a regex, jumping straight to the hit. tmux only ever searches the pane you're already in.

Knows where your commands are

One line in your shell rc (eval "$(termdock shell-init)") and termdock records where every prompt, command and output begins — in its own VT emulator, so it works over SSH in any terminal. Everything below depends on it, and tmux cannot do it at all: it has no emulator to record marks in.

Copy a command's whole output

Ctrl-B O. Exactly the lines that command printed — 2 or 3000 — with the prompt and the command itself excluded. In copy-mode it takes the command your cursor is on, so walking back with { and copying does what it looks like.

Jump between commands

{ and } in copy-mode. Move by command, not by line or page: each jump lands on a prompt with that run's output below it. Finding where a test run started stops being a scroll hunt.

Session-wide command history

Ctrl-B H. Fuzzy-search every command run in any pane, with how it exited and how long it took. Your shell's history is per-pane, records what you typed but not what happened, and isn't written until that shell exits. Enter types it back, without running it.

Session timeline

Ctrl-B T. Every command on one shared scale, with a bar for its span — so "was the build still running when I started the migration?" is a glance instead of an archaeology dig across four scrollbacks.

Tell me when it finishes

Ctrl-B m. Mark a pane; when its command exits you get a bell and a message naming it. No shell setup, and it can be armed after the command is already running — which a ; notify-send wrapper fundamentally cannot.

Log a whole window

Ctrl-B A. Names a directory and logs every pane in the window into it, one file each — deploy-feat_login-api_server.log, named after the session, the window and the pane's own name. The moment before you reproduce something: six panes, one keystroke, a folder you can attach to a ticket. tmux's pipe-pane is one pane at a time, with the filename written out by hand.

Settings, live

Ctrl-B C. Every setting with its current value and what it does. ←→ steps through the values a setting can take — all twelve palettes on theme, applying each as you land on it — and Enter types one into the row for anything free-form. S writes the current value to your config file, rewriting just that line.

Mouse throughout

Click a pane to focus it, drag a border to resize, drag a tab to reorder, drag a pane's title onto another window's tab to move it there — process and all. Click-drag on content selects and copies.

Switch sessions in place

Ctrl-B S. Hop to another running session without detaching from this one first — a type-ahead list rather than a detach-and-reattach round trip.

Drive it from a script

send-keys, split-window, new-window, select-pane, list-panes — set a whole dev environment up from a shell script, with no client attached.

termdock doctor

Checks the things that fail silently: a misspelled theme being ignored, shell integration that was never set up, a terminal quietly rounding your colours. Every warning names the fix.

Each of these is explained properly in the manual — getting started, shell integration, working in it all day, configuration, remote & sharing, every key — or keep the one-page cheatsheet next to you.

In action

Splitting, the live overview, the settings screen, a theme changed mid-session, search across scrollbacks, the popup, the jump picker — then detaching and picking it straight back up.

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

Dracula theme, git branch in the status bar. Everything shown is a keypress from a fresh install.

Installation

Native packages for linux, archives for macOS, both amd64 and arm64 — built and published straight from the tag.

# Debian, Ubuntu, Mint — grab the asset from the latest release
$ sudo apt install ./termdock_<version>_linux_amd64.deb

# Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE
$ sudo dnf install ./termdock_<version>_linux_amd64.rpm

# Alpine
$ sudo apk add --allow-untrusted ./termdock_<version>_linux_amd64.apk

# anything else, including macOS — one static binary, no runtime deps
$ tar xf termdock_<version>_linux_amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo install termdock /usr/local/bin/

# with Go already installed
$ go install github.com/padovanl/termdock@latest

Filenames carry the version — copy the exact link from the latest release. Then run termdock; Ctrl-B ? lists every key there is. The packages also drop a commented example config at /usr/share/doc/termdock/termdock.conf.example — though you never have to write one by hand.

Every key, one prefix

Everything sits behind Ctrl-B, as in tmux. The full reference is in the app at any time with Ctrl-B ? — and it's generated from your actual bindings, so it stays true if you rebind anything.

Keys	What happens
Ctrl-B ?	The whole keybinding reference — start here
Ctrl-B v / s	Split the pane side by side, or stacked
Ctrl-B ←↓↑→	Move the focus; keep pressing arrows to keep going
Ctrl-B z	Zoom the active pane full screen, and back
Ctrl-B c	New window
Ctrl-B w	Fuzzy-jump to any window or pane, with a preview
Ctrl-B g	Live overview of every pane in the session
Ctrl-B /	Search every pane's scrollback at once
Ctrl-B [	Copy-mode: scroll, select, yank to the system clipboard
Ctrl-B C	Settings — change any of them live
Ctrl-B P	The floating popup terminal
Ctrl-B S	Switch to another session without detaching
Ctrl-B u	Pick a URL or path off the screen, straight to the clipboard
Ctrl-B d	Detach — the session carries on without you

Coming back later is termdock ls to see what's still running, then termdock attach -t main.