VT coverage
Modern CLI apps behave like they should.
True color, wide characters, scroll regions, alt screen, hyperlinks, palette queries, focus events, bracketed paste, URL detection, and search all land in the core before the UI paints.
GPU terminal for command-line work that moves.
The terminal that can keep up with your build.
Sinclair is a fast, standards-focused terminal for macOS and Linux. It pairs a meticulous VT core with tabs, splits, live config, MCP, and a local relay for coordinating agent teams.
~/dev/sinclair prompt open team web
opened window “web” with 4 agent panes
~/dev/sinclair cargo test -p vt screen
running 583 tests
test result: ok. 583 passed
~/dev/sinclair sinclair notify "review ready"
█See it in motion.
Sinclair, in twenty-eight seconds.
GPU rendered
Built on gpui with crisp text, box drawing, emoji, ligatures, and smooth scrollback.
Terminal deep
OSC 8 links, OSC 52 clipboard, kitty keyboard, mouse reporting, synchronized output, sixel + kitty graphics.
Agent ready
MCP bridge, live status dots, per-agent git worktrees, resumable sessions, and a local SQLite relay bus.
Built for the work, not the demo.
A terminal core that respects the weird parts.
Workspace
Tabs, recursive splits, and focus that follows your intent.
Each pane is its own shell. Split any direction, drag dividers, restore sessions, and keep the working directory moving with you.
Config
Plain text settings, live the moment you save.
Fonts, keybindings, shell, themes, padding, cursor, and behavior stay editable in a readable config file or the settings UI.
For people running more than one brain at once.
Launch agent teams into real terminal panes.
Sinclair includes a bundled relay sidecar. Agents register, join channels, send messages, wait without burning cycles, and show up where command-line work already happens: in tabs and splits you can see. Quick-launch Claude Code or Codex from the menu, or design a whole team — by hand or with an AI-guided builder — and open it into a window of its own, one member per pane, resizable dividers between them, your existing layout untouched.
Every pane reports what it's doing as a colored status dot — working, blocked, done, idle — so you can read a whole team at a glance. Give each agent its own git worktree so they never clobber each other's files, and when you reopen Sinclair, agent panes in your main window resume their sessions instead of starting cold — a team window you reopen from the menu, fresh.
lead
frontend
backend
reviewer
relay bus
Make the terminal yours — and your agents'.
Extend Sinclair with plugins.
A plugin is a small folder with a plugin.toml. Contribute
shell commands, live panels, webview surfaces, or event hooks — and
tools your AI agents can call. A plugin's
[[tool]] joins Sinclair's MCP server, so the same agent that
drives your terminal can query your database or read host stats through
whatever you've installed. The terminal's extensions and its AI are one
surface.
Share yours by opening a PR that adds
plugins/<your-plugin-name>/plugin.toml to the
community catalog at
github.com/wess/sinclair.
plugin.toml
id = "tools"
name = "Dev Tools"
[[command]]
id = "logs"
title = "Tail app logs"
run = "tail -f ./log/dev.log"
mode = "split-down"
keybind = "cmd+ctrl+l"
ship faster
stay local
own the loop
Suggests as you type
Fish-style inline autosuggestions complete your command from history, common commands, and paths — accept with →. Add a completion popup, Tab-cycling, or an AI fallback, each toggled on its own.
Readable automation
Record typed command macros as plain text and replay them with keybindings, paced by shell prompt marks when available.
Share your sessions
Record a pane, then export it to a GIF or MP4 — carrying the same ligatures, fonts, and box-drawing you see on screen. Or save the whole buffer straight to a text file with ⌘S.
Terminal-aware notifications
OSC notifications and sinclair notify raise native banners and light up background tabs until you look.
Theme without ceremony
Start with 22 built-in schemes, follow the OS light/dark setting live, and override exactly the colors you care about — plus transparency, a background image, and a readability contrast floor.
Keyboard everything
Hint mode opens links by keystroke, copy mode selects with vi keys, and one shortcut grabs the last command's output. Fuzzy pickers for clipboard history, snippets, launch profiles, and emoji.
A clean machine in a tab
Open a fresh Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Fedora, or Arch userland — or any OCI image — as a container-backed tab with ⌘⇧T, disposable by default. Or attach a shell to a container you already have running with ⌘⇧C. It scrolls, themes, and records like any other pane.
Guardrails & glance
Redact secrets from every copy, fire notifications on regex output triggers, timestamp and annotate lines, and read who's working, blocked, done, or idle across every tab from the Activity panel's status dots.
One container, whole team
Put a project and its entire agent team inside one shared sandbox container: a single filesystem, a single toolchain, and a real boundary around agents whose permission prompts you just turned off. Docker or Podman is the only thing you need — and if your repo has a devcontainer.json, that is the environment they land in.
A worktree per agent
Spin up a git worktree in a new tab with one action — or let an agent create its own over MCP — so several agents work the same repo on isolated branches without colliding. New worktrees fire plugin triggers, so setup runs itself.
Resume where you left off
Turn on session restore and Sinclair reopens your tabs, splits, and directories — and relaunches agent panes resumed, reloading their own session instead of starting cold.
Scriptable by design
sinclair mcp exposes tabs, panes, screen reads, input, macros, splits, git worktrees, agent status, and notifications to local tools — plus every tool your plugins add.
Keeps itself current
Sinclair checks GitHub for new releases and offers to update — running brew/apt for package installs, or swapping a manual .dmg/AppImage in place and relaunching.
Open source. macOS, Linux, and Windows.
Install it, star it, and help shape the terminal.
Sinclair ships from GitHub releases — a Homebrew cask and universal
.dmg for macOS, AppImage, deb, and tarball packages for
Linux on x86_64 and aarch64, and a beta MSI/Scoop build for Windows.
Detecting your platform…
Download
brew install --cask wess/packages/sinclair