Grand Central Terminal

A terminal multiplexer that doesn't hide your terminals.
One infinite canvas, and agents are welcome on it.
About · Install · Usage · Configuration · Keybindings · Agents

What is this? #

GCT is a terminal multiplexer, like tmux. A daemon owns your shells and the app attaches to it, so quitting the app kills nothing. Relaunch and your panes are back with their scrollback.

The difference is that nothing is hidden. tmux has sessions, windows and panes, plus a status line to tell you what's in the ones you can't see. GCT has windows. All of them are live on one infinite canvas, and you pan and zoom to look at whichever you like. You can group windows, but a group is a colored box you drag around. It isn't a level in a hierarchy you have to navigate.

It's built on libghostty, so terminals render on the GPU and read your Ghostty config. macOS app, with daemons for macOS and Linux.

What about agents? #

GCT was built for them. Coding agents run builds, dev servers and test loops in the background all day, and you find out one is stuck when the agent tells you, or doesn't. In GCT the agent opens a pane, the pane shows up on your canvas, and you can see what the job is doing without asking.

gctd open name=build cmd="make -j8"      # a new pane on your canvas
gctd dump build --strip-ansi             # the agent reads it back

gctd agent-setup install teaches Claude, Codex, opencode and Cursor that this exists. See docs/agents.md.

Why that name? #

It's a central terminal for your terminals, and it's grand. The daemon is gctd: grand central terminal depot.

Install #

Grab a build from the releases page.

macOS (arm64): brew install --cask dws-llc/tap/gct, or unzip GrandCentralTerminal-<ver>-macos-arm64.zip and drag the app to /Applications. Open it. It's signed and notarized. Then run "Install gctd Command…" from the app menu to put gctd on your PATH and tell your agents about it.

Linux (x86_64, arm64): gctd-<ver>-linux-<arch>.tar.gz is the headless daemon, static, runs on any distro. Put its panes on your Mac's canvas with remote daemons.

V=$(curl -fsSLI -o /dev/null -w '%{url_effective}' https://github.com/DWS-LLC/grandcentralterminal/releases/latest | sed 's|.*/v||'); mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && curl -fsSL "https://github.com/DWS-LLC/grandcentralterminal/releases/download/v$V/gctd-$V-linux-$(uname -m).tar.gz" | tar -xz -C ~/.local/bin
gctd --port=7420 --token=<token>

To build from source, see docs/building.md.

How do I use it? #

⌘T opens a pane, ⌘H/J/K/L moves between them, ⌘P jumps to any of them, ⌘0 zooms out so you can see all of it. The rest is in docs/keybindings.md.

Where are the docs? #

• Using the canvas
• Configuration
• Default keybindings
• Agents and the gctd CLI
• Remote daemons
• Building and releasing
• Changelog

Known limits #

• Scrollback lives in daemon memory. gctd stop loses it, same as killing a tmux server.
• Every pane renders live at every zoom level, so hundreds of heavy panes cost GPU.
• A hidden doom-mode window pauses pane rendering. The terminal output keeps flowing and replays when it comes back.
• On macOS, read() on a pty master never returns when the shell dies (Linux gives EIO). The daemon's reaper catches it, and the dead pane can linger as a frozen frame for a moment.

License #

MIT.