Installation

Requirements

A shell — and, to launch Claude sessions, the Claude Code CLI 1.0.61 or newer on your PATH.

That floor is the CLI’s --settings flag, which TermHerd puts on every Claude launch. It re-enables the CLI’s terminal title for that session only, and the title is where a Claude session’s activity status comes from: without it, a CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_TERMINAL_TITLE anywhere in your own settings would leave every session reading starting forever. An older CLI rejects the flag and the launch fails. TermHerd’s other flag, --mcp-config (the live bridge), has been available since 0.2.75.

A plain shell needs nothing installed — see Status and attention for what it takes to give one an accurate status.

Desktop installers

Each tagged release publishes installers on the Releases page.

Builds are not signed yet. On macOS, first launch needs a right-click → Open, or clearing the quarantine flag:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/TermHerd.app

On Windows, SmartScreen may warn — choose More info → Run anyway.

Bare command-line binary

The same releases carry one-line installers that drop termherd into your Cargo bin directory. Every release so far is a pre-release, which GitHub’s /releases/latest/ shortcut skips, so name the tag — the newest one is at the top of the Releases page:

# macOS / Linux
TAG=v0.1.0-prerelease.4
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  "https://github.com/Termherd/termherd/releases/download/$TAG/termherd-app-installer.sh" | sh

# Windows
$Tag = "v0.1.0-prerelease.4"
irm "https://github.com/Termherd/termherd/releases/download/$Tag/termherd-app-installer.ps1" | iex

Verifying a Linux download

Linux release binaries carry a sigstore keyless build-provenance attestation — no signing key; the signer is the release workflow itself, via GitHub OIDC, logged in the public Rekor transparency log.

gh attestation verify termherd-app-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz \
  --repo Termherd/termherd

A passing check proves both integrity and that the artifact was built by this repository’s CI. The attestation and its SHA256SUMS file come from a signing step added after v0.1.0-prerelease.4, so that pre-release has neither — only per-file .sha256 checksums and a combined sha256.sum, which every release carries.

From source

The toolchain is pinned in rust-toolchain.toml (Rust 1.95.0, edition 2024); rustup picks it up automatically.

git clone https://github.com/Termherd/termherd
cd termherd
cargo run -p termherd-app

Where TermHerd writes

Never under ~/.claude. Everything it owns lives in ~/.termherd (%USERPROFILE%\.termherd on Windows):

TermHerd is single-instance: an advisory lock file under the system temp directory. To run a second build alongside one that already holds the lock, point it at a throwaway temp dir so its lock path differs:

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d) cargo run -p termherd-app