tend

From the ticket and the production error to the pull request, with agents,
without leaving the terminal.

tend takes a GitHub issue or a GlitchTip error, opens a worktree for it and
hands it to Claude Code, Codex or whichever agent you use. You follow every
agent on one screen — each pane marked working, blocked or idle — and close
the issue or resolve the error when it is fixed, from the same place.

Under it is a terminal runtime built for agents: a background server that
keeps them running when you detach, spaces and tabs for your projects, and a
socket API so agents can spawn panes and wait on each other.

Written in Go, single binary, no cgo. Made by
Auth Tecnologia Ltda, Belo Horizonte, Brazil —
tend.auth.com.br.

Status: usable. Panes are drawn, keys and the mouse reach them, text reflows
when you resize, scrollback is readable, the client reconnects by itself, and
detaching leaves everything running.

install

curl -fsSL https://tend.auth.com.br/install.sh | sh

On Windows, tend runs inside WSL: docs/WINDOWS.md walks
through it. From a checkout: make install.

try it

tend

That is the whole thing. It opens a session, starting a server for it if there
is not one already, and draws it.

┌ 1 claude ●──────────────────────────┐┌ 2 codex ▲───────────────────────────┐
│⠋ Pondering the refactor…            ││ Do you want to proceed?             │
│                                     ││  ❯ 1. Yes                           │
│                                     ││    2. No                            │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘└─────────────────────────────────────┘
 work · main · agents   1:claude ●  2:codex ▲

Run an agent in a pane, as you would in any terminal. tend reads its screen
and marks the pane working, blocked or idle. ctrl+b d detaches and leaves
everything running; tend again is back where you were.

A space holds tabs, a tab holds panes. The mouse works throughout: click,
drag a border, scroll, right-click for a menu.

keys

ctrl+b is the prefix: press it, then the key. ctrl+b ? lists every key.

tools

Each is a key after the prefix, and most are a button over the spaces list.
docs/TOOLS.md has each one in detail.

And without a key:

commands

Everything works against the same server, from anywhere:

tend new -- claude          # open a pane; prints its id
tend new -split 1 -dir rows -- codex
tend ls                     # what is running
tend kill 2                 # close one pane
tend kill -server           # stop the session
tend --remote host          # a session on another machine, over ssh
tend shortcut               # put tend in your desktop's application launcher

The panes belong to the server, not to the command that opened them: every
line above is a separate process, and the agents keep working between them.
-s NAME runs more than one session side by side. tend help lists the
rest.

settings

Optional, at ~/.config/tend/config.toml. tend config -init writes a
commented copy of the defaults; tend config says where it is and whether it
loads.

[keys]
prefix = "ctrl+a"

[pane]
shell = ["/bin/zsh"]
scrollback = 20000

[ui]
mouse = true

[ui.theme]
border_focused = "blue"
blocked = "#ff5f5f"

A misspelled setting is an error rather than being ignored, since a setting
quietly dropped is one you believe is in effect.

updates

tend looks for a newer release in the background and says so: "update ready"
at the right of the status bar. menu → update ready shows what is new,
and u there installs it without stopping what is running (tend update -handoff). [update] version_check = false turns the check off. about
tend, first in the menu, says which tend is running.

tend used to live at github.com/sousaakira/tend. Old links, clones and
installs follow it here.

development

make dev      # fast loop: cached, fail-fast, no vet (~50ms warm)
make watch    # re-run `make dev` on every .go change
make check    # gofmt + vet + full tests — run before committing
make bench    # parser hot-path benchmarks; internal/vt must stay 0 allocs/op

make dev narrows to ./internal/... and turns off the vet pass that
go test runs by default, which is where most of the time goes. make check
puts both back.

To debug how an agent's state is read, capture its screen once and iterate
against the file instead of against a live agent:

bin/tend agents -v                        # the agents tend can detect
bin/tend watch -- claude                  # run one and report its state live
bin/tend watch -capture out.raw -- codex  # ...and keep the raw bytes
bin/tend detect -agent claude out.raw     # replay a capture offline
bin/tend explain -agent claude out.raw    # ...and see how every rule voted
bin/tend screen out.raw                   # ...and what the terminal core made of it
bin/tend follow                           # state changes of a running session

watch runs one command on a pseudo-terminal, mirrors its output, and prints
state changes to stderr, each with the rule that decided it:

[tend] watching claude as "claude" on a 120x40 terminal
[tend] working   osc_title_working
[tend] blocked   bash_permission_prompt
[tend] idle      live_prompt_box

tend serve runs a session's server in the foreground, which is for watching
it rather than for using it. make dist cross-compiles the release binaries
for Linux and macOS.

Requires Go 1.27+.

architecture

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

working on tend

tend is a port of herdr to Go, and the porting is ongoing.

• CONTRIBUTING.md — setting up, the gate, tests, commits
  and pull requests. Start here.
• AGENTS.md — how to work here: the rules, the gate, the traps.
  Written for AI agents; it is the right first read for anyone.
• docs/PORTING.md — what has been ported, what has not, and
  where each missing piece lives in herdr's source. The work queue.

license

Apache-2.0, © Auth Tecnologia Ltda. Security problems go to
[email protected] (SECURITY.md); contributions are signed
off (CONTRIBUTING.md). tend is an independent Go implementation of the architecture of
herdr; see NOTICE for attribution.

If tend is useful to you, you can support it on
GitHub Sponsors.