ai-terminal-manager (atm)

English | 中文 | 日本語

Why this exists

AI CLIs are now good enough to carry most day-to-day development. Tools to manage them are multiplying — and almost all of them are desktop GUIs. The problem is that a large share of real development doesn't happen on a desktop at all:

• the code lives on a server; you SSH in and work there. A GUI can't be installed, and shouldn't be;
• one person keeps three or four Claude Code / Codex sessions open, each in its own tty, and which conversation lives in which window is something you just have to remember;
• a dropped connection, a reboot, a different machine — every session is gone at once, leaving only a pile of jsonl files on disk.

What these people lack is not another GUI. It's multi-session management inside tmux — the tool they already have open. tmux has already solved process persistence, reconnect, cross-machine takeover and layout serialization. The one thing missing is a layer that treats AI sessions as first-class citizens. atm is that layer and nothing else.

Two things you get for free along the way:

• It's light. No Electron, no resident daemon. atm runs only in the instant you press a key (warm start 5 ms, measured, see the research log); the sidebar is a Python TUI in an ordinary tmux pane. How much lighter than a desktop GUI this is has not been quantified — this is a usage impression, not a measured number.
• tmux's own session restore just works. tmux-resurrect / continuum rebuild windows, panes and directories after a reboot; you press one key in the right pane to resume yesterday's conversation. No need to invent another state persistence scheme.

What it is — and isn't

It is a tmux session manager for AI CLIs (Claude Code / Codex / Pi). Three things:

1. merge the session history of all three CLIs into one list, fuzzy-search it, and drop a session into the tmux pane you choose to --resume there;
2. a collapsible persistent left sidebar listing the panes that are currently running; select one and it swap-panes into the main pane, process untouched;
3. install and configure tmux-resurrect + continuum on the way, so the skeleton comes back after a reboot.

It is not a GUI, a layout synchronizer or a control-mode parser. The tmux ecosystem and the official Desktop app already own those (survey in research/notes/survey-existing-tools.md). It also never sends session data anywhere — it only reads local files.

For: people developing in tmux on Linux / WSL2 / servers with several AI sessions open at once. Not for: people who don't use tmux; people with a single AI session; people who need floating windows and free layouts (tmux is a binary split tree).

This repository doubles as a research log: "how to use" is in docs/usage.md; "why it's designed this way / what we measured and tripped over" is the research log and research/notes/. Every conclusion later overturned is kept with strikethrough, not erased.

Install

Requirements

• Linux or WSL2 with tmux ≥ 3.2 (display-popup appeared in 3.2; developed against 3.6, tested on 3.4)
• Python ≥ 3.11, zero runtime dependencies
• at least one of Claude Code / Codex / Pi installed (atm only reads the session files they write to ~/.claude/projects/, ~/.codex/sessions/, ~/.pi/agent/sessions/)

Installation

uv is recommended:

# from PyPI (the command is still `atm`)
uv tool install ai-terminal-manager

# or straight from the repository, no clone — always the latest main
uv tool install git+https://github.com/lyfuci/ai-terminal-manager

# or clone and install (add --editable to have source edits take effect immediately)
git clone https://github.com/lyfuci/ai-terminal-manager
uv tool install ./ai-terminal-manager

Without uv, pipx install ai-terminal-manager works the same. To upgrade: atm update — it detects how atm was installed (uv tool / pipx / pip, PyPI or git) and runs the matching upgrade; atm update --check only looks.

Check-up, key bindings, persistence

atm doctor      # are the data sources there, does tmux respond, how many sessions are found, is the autosave hook really installed
atm install     # write key bindings to ~/.tmux.conf + install resurrect/continuum. Prints what it will write and asks first; -y skips the prompt

atm install does two things, each written as its own marker-delimited block, with a backup taken first:

• Key-binding block: four bindings — prefix + a/A popup, prefix + b/B sidebar (details in docs/usage.md). Applied to the running tmux server immediately. Keys can be changed: atm install --key s --sidebar-key g.
• Persistence block: installs tmux-resurrect + tmux-continuum via tpm (cloned into ~/.tmux/plugins/), turns on @continuum-restore, autosaves every 10 minutes. After a reboot, sessions / windows / panes / cwd come back by themselves. It deliberately does not relaunch claude / codex — launching them all at once at boot ate all available memory in one go (research/notes/2026-08-12-incident.md, appendix 3); you resume sessions on demand in the right pane. Don't want it: --no-persist. If you already manage tpm yourself it is skipped, nothing is written twice.

The CLI speaks English, Chinese and Japanese, following your locale (ATM_LANG=en|zh|ja overrides).

Optional but recommended on a shared or memory-tight box: atm config memory.high 4G then launch with atm claude / atm codex / atm pi to run inside a cgroup memory gate. Plain claude stays unlimited — the prefix is the choice. See docs/usage.md.

If tmux isn't installed, atm install prints the install command for your package manager; it never runs sudo for you. Uninstall: atm uninstall && uv tool uninstall ai-terminal-manager — removes only those two blocks, not a character of your own config, and leaves the cloned plugins alone.

Documentation

• Usage — the four keys, popup and sidebar, command line, how it works
• Reference — every option, measured performance, session-file formats, the memory gate
• Research log — why it's designed this way, what was measured, every pitfall (overturned conclusions kept with strikethrough)
• Contributing

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Development setup and conventions: CONTRIBUTING.md; for security issues don't open a public issue, see SECURITY.md. License: MIT.