<2-3 sentences summarising what the project addresses and solves, the target audience, and the benefit.> Harness Terminal is a native macOS application providing a GPU-rendered, persistent terminal environment. It keeps coding sessions alive across restarts and proactively notifies users when coding agents require attention, streamlining developer workflows.

How It Works

It employs a Swift-based, GPU-accelerated terminal engine and a background daemon for session management, persisting state to disk for resilience. A companion harness-cli enables programmatic control, scripting, and remote operation. Agent awareness is achieved by monitoring processes, identifying supported coding agents, and alerting users to required input or approval.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Installation: Download the signed and notarized .dmg from GitHub releases and install Harness.app.
• Requirements: Apple silicon Mac running macOS 15.0 or later.
• Build from Source: Requires Xcode 16+ and Swift 6.0.
• Remote/Headless Daemon: Compatible with macOS or Linux machines with Swift 6.0.
• Documentation: Migration guide (docs/MIGRATION.md), agent hooks (docs/agent-hooks/README.md), and shell integration snippets are available.

Highlighted Details

• GPU Rendering: Features a custom, GPU-accelerated terminal engine with support for accurate sRGB, optional Display-P3 color, ligatures, and inline images (Sixel/Kitty/iTerm2).
• Persistent Sessions: Daemon-owned sessions, tabs, and splits persist to disk, surviving application quits and daemon restarts; sessions can be attached locally or remotely via SSH.
• Agent Awareness: Detects and alerts users to activity from supported coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), with a shortcut to jump to waiting agents.
• Scriptability: harness-cli provides extensive command-line control over sessions, panes, and agent interactions, supporting headless and remote daemon operation.
• Theming: Includes over 490 built-in color themes and supports custom .harnesstheme import/export.
• Updates: Automatic, signed background updates via the Sparkle framework.

Maintenance & Community

The project is hosted on GitHub with releases managed through GitHub releases. Specific community channels (e.g., Discord, Slack) or details on core contributors/sponsorships are not detailed in the README.

Licensing & Compatibility

• License: MIT License.
• Compatibility: Permissive for commercial use and integration with closed-source applications.

Limitations & Caveats

The application is exclusive to Apple silicon Macs running macOS 15.0 or later. Building from source requires a recent Xcode (16+) and Swift (6.0) toolchain. Agent detection relies on process monitoring, which may not cover all custom or future agent implementations.