Quick start

Five minutes, from a cold launch to two sessions side by side with an agent driving them.

1. Launch it

Open the app you installed:

Platform	Launch
macOS	TermHerd in Applications — Launchpad, Spotlight, or double-click it in Finder.
Windows	TermHerd in the Start menu, or its desktop shortcut.
Linux	TermHerd in your application menu (`.deb`), or run the `.AppImage` directly.

Prefer the terminal? The bare command-line binary is on your PATH as termherd, and from a clone it is one command:

termherd                      # the installed bare binary
cargo run -p termherd-app     # from a clone

If you have not installed it yet, see Installation.

The window opens on the workspace: the sidebar on the left, listing every Claude session TermHerd found by walking ~/.claude/projects, grouped by project — plus any repository you added by hand; the tab strip across the top; the focused terminal filling the rest.

Nothing is scanned from your source trees and nothing under ~/.claude is written. A first run on a large history takes a moment to walk the tree — the scan is in-memory (a SQLite cache is roadmapped, not shipped).

About the chords below

Every shortcut is rebindable, and the defaults differ by platform. The tables give both columns; the full vocabulary is in Keyboard shortcuts.

2. Open a session

Click a project in the sidebar to expand it, then click a session to open it in a tab. TermHerd resumes it through the Claude CLI.

From the keyboard, with a terminal focused:

Action	macOS	Windows / Linux
New shell in the focused session’s directory	`Cmd`+`T`	`Ctrl`+`T`
New Claude session in that directory	`Cmd`+`Alt`+`T`	`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`T`
Focus the sidebar search box	`Cmd`+`F`	`Ctrl`+`F`

Search matches session titles and indexed transcript content; a content hit shows the matched line under the row so you can tell why it matched. See The sidebar.

3. Arrange it

Action	macOS	Windows / Linux
Split vertically (side by side)	`Cmd`+`D`	`Ctrl`+`D`
Split horizontally (stacked)	`Cmd`+`Shift`+`D`	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`D`
Move focus between panes	`Cmd`+`Shift`+`←↑↓→`	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`←↑↓→`
Next / previous tab	`Ctrl`+`Tab` / `Ctrl`+`Shift`+`Tab`	same
Jump straight to tab 1–9	`Cmd`+`1`…`9`	`Ctrl`+`1`…`9`
Close the focused pane (a lone pane closes its tab)	`Cmd`+`W`	`Ctrl`+`W`
Reopen the tab you just closed	`Cmd`+`Shift`+`T`	`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`T`

Tabs also reorder by drag-and-drop. Split panes always share their space evenly — resizing them, by keyboard or by drag, is the remaining piece of F-terminal-split.

4. Watch what needs you

Each tab carries an activity dot: busy while a session is working, attention when it is waiting on you (a permission prompt, a question), idle when it is done. That is also what arms the close confirmation — closing a tab whose session is mid-command asks first, closing an idle one does not. Status and attention.

5. Let a session drive the workspace

A Claude session launched from TermHerd already has the MCP control surface wired in. Ask it, inside that session:

Split this pane, run cargo test in the new one, wait for it to finish, and tell me what failed.

It will call split_pane → run_in_session → wait_for_status → read_terminal. That act → wait → observe loop, and everything else the session can reach, is in Driving termherd over MCP.

6. Make it yours

There is no settings panel yet: edit ~/.termherd/settings.json (%USERPROFILE%\.termherd\settings.json on Windows) and restart. Shell, theme, terminal colours and font size, close-confirmation policy, sidebar density, GIF recording budget, the editor a clicked file path opens in, and every key binding live there — full reference.

Where to go next

The sidebar — browsing, search, stars, plans and memory
The terminal — selection, clickable links and paths, scrollback, zoom
Capture and record — hand an AI assistant the app’s exact state