Capabilities
A workflow orchestrator, not a terminal emulator.
Quil ships as a client-daemon pair. The client (quil)
is a Bubble Tea v2 TUI. The daemon (quild) is a
Go service that holds pane state, ghost buffers, and the
workspace snapshot. Every feature on this page is implemented
as of v1.0.0.
Reboot-proof sessions
Workspaces survive full host reboots. Type `quil` after a restart and everything snaps back.
- Continuous snapshot of tabs, panes, layout, and working directories to ~/.quil/workspace.json.
- Ghost buffers render the last 500 lines of each pane instantly while shells re-initialise.
- Pane split tree is serialised to JSON and restored on reconnect — same horizontal/vertical nesting, same ratios.
- Target boot-to-productive time: under 30 seconds.
Live CWD tracking
Pane borders show the shell's current directory in real time — no config, no manual hooks.
- Auto-injects OSC 7 hooks into bash, zsh, and PowerShell at spawn time.
- Fish emits OSC 7 natively, no injection needed.
- The directory shown on the pane border updates on every cd, pushd, and popd.
AI session resume
Claude Code conversations resume automatically after a reboot. No copy-paste, no context rebuild.
- Each AI pane gets a UUID at creation time. On restart Quil runs `claude --resume <session-id>` automatically.
- Works for any AI tool that exposes a session ID — Claude Code today, more to come.
- For tools without a session ID, plugins can fall back to regex scraping the last state or replaying a command.
MCP server for AI agents
Run `quil mcp` and an AI agent can list panes, read output, send keystrokes, and snapshot your workspace.
- 13 tools exposed over the Model Context Protocol (Anthropic's open standard for AI tool use).
- Tools include: list panes, read pane output, send keys, switch tabs, screenshot a pane, and more.
- Lets any MCP-capable client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor) reach directly into your running Quil session.
Typed panes
Terminals are not all the same. Quil understands pane types and gives each one context-aware behaviour.
- Four built-in pane types: Terminal, Claude Code, SSH, Stripe.
- Each type has its own resume strategy, error handler, and status line.
- User-definable additional types via TOML plugin files in ~/.quil/plugins/.
tmux-style splits
Arbitrarily nested horizontal and vertical splits with mouse click hit-testing.
- Binary split tree, each split with its own direction and ratio.
- Click any pane to focus it; scroll wheel traverses terminal history.
- Focus mode (Ctrl+E) expands the active pane full-screen while others keep running in the background.
Pane notes
Alt+E opens a plain-text editor beside any pane. Notes save automatically and travel with the workspace.
- Markdown-compatible plain text, rendered as the pane loses focus.
- 30-second debounce auto-save, Ctrl+S for explicit save.
- Side-by-side layout so you can take notes while the pane keeps producing output.
Cross-platform from day one
Native Linux, macOS, and Windows support. No WSL required.
- PTY via creack/pty on Unix, ConPTY on Windows.
- IPC via Unix domain sockets on Linux/macOS, Named Pipes on Windows.
- Pre-built binaries for linux/amd64, linux/arm64, darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, windows/amd64.
TOML plugin system
Declare a new pane type in a single TOML file. No compilation, no restart, hot-reload on save.
- Plugin definitions live in ~/.quil/plugins/<name>.toml.
- Sections: [plugin], [spawn], [keys], [resume], [error], [status] — each optional.
- Declarative config means no shell scripting footguns; the daemon validates the TOML at load time.
Notification center
Quil detects when a pane exits, errors, or goes idle and surfaces it in a dedicated sidebar.
- Daemon-side event queue with pattern-matching idle analysis.
- Process exit detection with exit-code extraction.
- Optional sidebar surfaces notifications without interrupting focused work.
Ready to stop losing your workspace?
Every feature on this page is in v1.0.0. Install it in 30 seconds.