Terminai
Open-source terminal wrapper giving Codex, Claude Code, or any CLI agent read and approval-gated write access to your shell
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terminai.appAbout Terminai
Terminai is a transparent terminal wrapper that gives any AI CLI agent on-demand, approval-gated access to your shell. You use your terminal exactly as you normally would — native scrollback and copy are preserved, which is where most terminal wrappers fall down — and press Ctrl+Space to open Codex, Claude Code, or your own agent in an overlay. The overlay is a real terminal running the agent you already use, with controlled access to the wrapped shell beneath it. The access model is the important part: the agent can read current terminal state through a built-in MCP server with no installation required on the agent's side, and any shell input it suggests is queued and waits for your explicit confirmation before it runs. Nothing executes behind your back. Terminai does not own your model credentials or provider routing — your configured CLI handles authentication and model selection, and Terminai supplies only the terminal wrapper, the MCP server, and the approval flow. It states plainly that it never collects your data and makes no outgoing network connections of its own. Bundled presets wire Terminai's MCP tools and context into Codex and Claude Code automatically, and you can point it at any CLI that can consume an MCP URL and a context prompt. It is open source on GitHub, installable via Homebrew (`brew install emosenkis/tap/terminai`), from source with Cargo, or from GitHub releases, and runs on Linux and macOS with minimal Windows support. The author describes it as alpha-quality software that they nonetheless use as a daily driver.
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Key Features
Terminai Pros & Cons
✅ Pros
- +Completely free and open source with no account
- +Approval-first design — the agent cannot run anything unilaterally
- +Preserves native terminal scrolling and copy, which most wrappers break
- +Provider-agnostic; it never touches your model credentials
⚠️ Cons
- −Explicitly alpha-quality software
- −Windows support is described as minimal
- −Requires an existing AI CLI subscription
- −Solo-maintainer project with no support commitment
Who Is Terminai Best For?
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