Introduction
Liu is a native terminal for macOS, built around AI-assisted coding. It sits between you and a variety of coding agents and makes ten parallel threads feel like one place.
What Liu is for
You open a terminal, run a coding agent, and ten sessions later you can't remember where you said what to whom. Liu was built around that problem.
Agent-first workflow. Run Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cursor Agent, Amp, OpenCode, Crush, Factory Droid, Antigravity, Kimi, Qwen Code, Grok and Command Code side by side. Liu also recognizes the standalone Cline CLI and the Cline, Roo Code and Kilo Code editor extensions.
- Translate-on-Tab + Voice Prompt - translate the current prompt before submission and dictate into the focused pane. Both local and hosted backends are configurable in Settings.
- Agent History - every supported CLI's on-disk session store, normalised and surfaced in one Cmd+K picker. Resume natively or open a transcript view to scroll user/assistant turns without launching the agent.
- AI Create Theme - ⌘ K → Create Theme. Describe the look, a local agent of your choice emits a JSON theme, Liu applies it live and drops it into ~/.config/Liu/themes/.
- File browser + Markdown viewer - open a workspace alongside your shell; read READMEs, designs and agent notes in a styled MD viewer (images included) without leaving the window.
- Site Manager + In-App Browser - register up to 32 local projects, supervise their dev servers and inspect the detected port in an embedded WebKit view on macOS.
- Quiet by default - liu-notify daemon does TTS / desktop alerts only when an agent actually needs you: tool-aware routing per (agent, event), token-bucket throttling, dedup.
Native PTYs, tabs, split panes, command palette, sidebar, encrypted vault, SSH/SFTP/Mosh - all there as the substrate.
What changed
Liu used to lead with "SSH client". That code is still in the tree and works, but it is no longer the headline. The current focus is the AI-agent toolchain above; SSH/SFTP/Mosh are kept linked because the same Session abstraction backs local PTYs and remote shells.
Active rewrites. Agent History, AI Create Theme and the Markdown viewer are mid-rewrite. The current code in the repo works, but expect on-disk formats and internal APIs to change. If you're sending a PR that touches any of them, open an issue first.
- macOS - Primary target. Metal renderer, native tab bar, AVSpeechSynthesizer for liu-notify.
- Linux - Builds and runs (X11, OpenGL 3.3, notify-send). Less polished.
Where to go next
- Installation - Build from source in under a minute.
- Quick start - First launch, vault, Agent History.
- Agent History - The headline page; supported tools and how scanning works.
- File browser - Sidebar tree, SFTP, viewers and the notes graph.
- Code Editor - Explorer rail, syntax highlighting, find/replace, status bar and the git diff dock.
- Markdown viewer - Styled MD rendering, vault search and Go to Heading.
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