What is clackatoo
clackatoo is a terminal workspace: a terminal emulator that grows into a place to work, with an agent harness built in. Its first priority is to be very fast and very light.
The daemon owns the terminals #
Most terminal emulators are one program: close the window and your shells die with it. In clackatoo, a background daemon owns every terminal. That means the pseudo-terminal each program runs on (its PTY), the program itself, and the grid of characters its output builds.
Everything else is a client of the daemon and talks to it over one protocol: the window, the clackatoo command, and later agents. Clients can be on another machine, reaching the daemon through ssh. Because the daemon owns the terminals:
- closing a window closes nothing, and reopening it brings everything back;
- a script can do anything a window can, because it uses the same requests;
- an agent is just another client. It can start terminals, type into them and read their screens.
The daemon is one thread waiting on every PTY and connection at once. A program's output goes straight from its PTY into the grid on that thread, with no locks and no handoff between threads.
What exists today #
The daemon; a window that shows workspaces of tabs and split panes, with Vim-like modes for scrolling, selecting, copying and searching, and a command line for opening panes; and a command-line client that can start terminals, type into them, show their screens and close them. Both clients work with a daemon on another machine. The quick start walks through both.
clackatoo runs on Linux.