Osade
Osade
Back to Osade

Documentation

Agents and conversations

Run one or several coding agents in a shared conversation while keeping each agent in its own lane.

An Osade conversation can contain one or several lanes. A lane is one agent process attached to one checkout. The conversation provides the shared transcript; each lane keeps its own agent, branch, status, and terminal session.

Start with one agent

Create a new chat, choose an installed agent, and send a message. If you do not name another agent, follow-up messages go to the conversation's primary lane.

The repository setting controls the default agent for new chats. Osade currently recognizes Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Pi and checks whether each command is available on PATH.

Terminal tabs

The new-session menu (Ctrl+T / Cmd+T) also opens a plain shell in the repository folder, in its own tab. It is not attached to any agent or chat.

  • On Windows the menu offers New Terminal: PowerShell, New Terminal: CMD Prompt, and New Terminal: Git Bash. Git Bash appears only when Git for Windows is installed; Osade looks for its bash.exe next to git on PATH and in the standard install folders, so the WSL bash launcher is never used. Git Bash starts as a login shell but stays in the repository folder.
  • On macOS and Linux the menu offers one terminal running your $SHELL.

The shell keeps running while you switch to other tabs, and its scrollback stays in the tab. Closing the tab (Ctrl+W / Cmd+W, or its ×) ends the shell and discards its saved output.

Terminal tabs persist

Terminal tabs come back when you reopen Osade, in the same order, with the same tab selected. Shells run in the Osade daemon, which keeps running after the window closes. So closing the window does not stop a terminal or anything running in it, such as an agent mid-task. When the window opens again, each tab reconnects to its shell and shows its recent output (about the last 256 KB).

If the daemon itself stopped, for example after a reboot or an Osade update, the shell is gone. The tab still comes back: it shows the output saved before the daemon stopped, a line saying Osade restarted, and a fresh shell in the same folder. Output is saved to ~/.osade/terminals/ about once a second while a terminal is busy. A crash can lose the last second, but a normal shutdown saves everything.

Open tabs are remembered on this computer. If a terminal's folder no longer exists, the reopened tab shows the error instead of a shell.

Terminal behaviour

Terminal tabs and a lane's Terminal view use the same emulator:

  • It renders on the GPU through WebGL. If WebGL is unavailable or the graphics context is lost, it falls back to the slower DOM renderer and keeps working.
  • Character widths follow Unicode 11, so emoji and CJK text line up the way agent TUIs expect.
  • Text uses a full 16-colour palette with truecolor (COLORTERM=truecolor).
  • URLs are clickable and open in your system browser.
  • Each terminal keeps up to 10,000 lines of scrollback. If you leave a lane and come back while its shell is still running, the terminal shows that shell's most recent output again (about the last 256 KB) instead of opening blank.
  • Ctrl+C copies when text is selected and otherwise interrupts. Ctrl+V pastes.

Agents started in a terminal tab

If you start a coding agent yourself in a terminal tab, Osade notices it and lists it in the sidebar under the project, in a Terminal card. Clicking the row switches to that tab, and the tab itself shows the agent's icon and topic in place of the shell's name. Right-click the row and choose Delete terminal to close the tab. This ends the shell and the agent running in it, and discards the tab's saved output, the same as closing the tab.

Osade finds the agent by checking the processes running under the tab's shell about every two seconds, so detection does not depend on the agent cooperating. It recognises Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Antigravity (agy), OpenCode, Cline, Kiro (kiro-cli), Freebuff, Codebuff, Aider, Goose, Amp, Kilo Code, Crush, Auggie, GitHub Copilot, Cursor (cursor-agent), Droid, Qwen Code, Kimi, Mistral Vibe, Continue (cn), Hermes, OpenClaw, Grok, Devin, Qoder, CodeBuddy, OpenClaude, Pi, Trae, Autohand, Command Code, MiMo Code, ZCode, and Jcode. They are recognised:

  • by executable name (claude.exe, kiro-cli, platform builds such as codex-x86_64-…);
  • or, for agents installed as Node or Python packages, by the script being run (node …/node_modules/cline/…, python -m aider).

The row leaves the sidebar when the agent process exits.

Each row shows one of three states:

  • Running: the agent is open. Agents that do not report their state stay here.
  • Working (pulsing): the agent is busy.
  • Done: it finished a turn, or is asking for permission, and is waiting for you.

Working and Done come from the window title the agent sets. Claude Code (✳ and spinner titles) and Gemini (✦, ◇, ✋) report them, and so does any agent that puts a spinner glyph in front of its title. If the agent writes a topic into the title, the row shows that topic.

These agents are not chats: Osade does not record their conversation, and the rows disappear when the tab closes. Only terminal tabs are checked, not a lane's Terminal view. An agent running on another machine over ssh is not detected.

Run multiple agents in one conversation

Use agent mentions to target work:

Review the authentication change and keep the public API stable.

@claude
Implement the refresh-token fix.

@codex
Add regression tests and look for edge cases.

Text before the first mention is shared with every mentioned agent. Text after a mention belongs to that agent until the next mention. If a mentioned CLI is not installed, Osade reports it before creating a broken lane.

Each mentioned agent gets a separate lane and an isolated branch/worktree when necessary. The lane buttons under the conversation title show which agent is focused, its branch, and whether it is starting, queued, working, or failed. Use the All and per-agent filters to read the combined transcript or one lane at a time.

Before a later turn, Osade can give an agent a short digest of recent sibling-lane activity, such as whether another agent is working, verifying, or has failing checks. Agents do not silently share a writable checkout.

Send follow-ups safely

The composer remains available while an agent is working. Sending during a live turn queues the follow-up until that lane is ready instead of interrupting the terminal input. The transcript marks held and failed deliveries.

A conversation shows only the chat. To work in a terminal, open a terminal tab for the project (see Terminal tabs); terminal output never becomes chat history.

Add images

Paste, drop, or choose image files in the composer. Osade accepts up to eight PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, or BMP images in one message. The files are placed in the task inbox and the agent is told to open them. Browser captures use this same path.

Add another repository as context

Choose Add read-only context repo beneath the composer to attach another local repository to the conversation. Osade tells agents where the context repositories are, but only the primary worktree is editable. Remove a context repository from the notice above the transcript.

Plan before implementation

Open Plan from the command center when you want a repository-level coordination conversation before starting implementation. The plan stays attached to the repository checkout and uses the same chat experience.

See Branches and worktrees for checkout isolation and Browser view for visual context.

Edit this page on GitHub ↗