Tutorials

Tutorials

The reference pages tell you what every option does. These tutorials show you how the pieces fit together — each one is a start-to-finish walkthrough you can type along with. There's a hands-on guide for every part of Sinclair: start at the top if you're new, or jump straight to the track you need.

Start here

Your first 10 minutesInstall, open a split, switch themes live, and learn the two shortcuts that unlock everything else.

Master the terminal

Ten guides that cover every day-to-day feature — the workspace, how it looks, how you configure it, and the power features that make the difference.

Organize your workspaceTabs, recursive splits, tile layouts, sidebars, broadcast input, session restore, and the quick terminal. Themes, fonts & appearancePick from 22 themes, follow OS light/dark, override colors, tune fonts and ligatures, and add transparency. Configuration & keybindingsThe live-reloading config file, the settings UI, and rebinding any action to the keys you want. Navigate & selectSearch, semantic search, jump-to-prompt, hint mode, copy mode, and grabbing a command's output in one keystroke. Clipboard, snippets & pickersClipboard history, secret redaction, snippets, launch profiles, and the emoji picker. Triggers & notificationsRegex output triggers, desktop notifications, line timestamps, annotations, badges, and the Activity dashboard. Record & shareCapture a pane, export it to a GIF or video with your exact fonts, and save the whole buffer to a file. Work in your project's dev containerOpen a terminal inside the environment your repo already defines, share the container your editor started, and write a devcontainer.json that suits people and agents alike. Run a throwaway Linux in a tabOpen a fresh Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Fedora, or Arch userland as a tab, keep the ones you need, and attach to running containers. Images in the terminalRender pictures inline with sixel — file previews, plots, and thumbnails that scroll with your output. Assist: type less, understand moreGhost-text completions, one-key explanations of output, and composing commands from a description — all local and offline.

Run agents like a team

Sinclair's headline feature is coordinating more than one coding agent at once — in real terminal panes you can see, over a local bus, each one reporting what it's doing. These build on each other.

Run your first agent teamLaunch a supervisor and two workers that message each other and park for free between tasks. Parallel agents in git worktreesGive every agent an isolated checkout so they never clobber each other's files — the flagship workflow. Share one container with your agentsPut the project and its whole team inside one Docker container: a shared filesystem, one toolchain, and a real boundary around unattended agents. Agent status at a glanceWire lifecycle hooks so every tab shows a live dot: working, blocked, done, or idle.

Automate & extend

Automate your terminal with MCPLet an MCP client drive your live window, record macros, and react to events with triggers. Build a pluginFour plugins step by step — a command, a live panel, a webview, and an agent-callable tool. Design your shell promptCompose a prompt visually and apply it to zsh or bash.
Tip

Every action a tutorial mentions is reachable from the command palette (⌘⇧P), so you can always find a feature by name even before you've learned its keybinding.