Pulse keeps your terminals alive. A background daemon owns every ConPTY session and journals its scrollback to disk, so closing the window — or rebooting the machine — never loses your work. Reopen the app and every terminal is exactly where you left it: same directory, same scrollback, same running program, right down to your Claude Code sessions.
It is a single native Rust binary (egui + wgpu, DirectX 12) with a seamless, zero-divider UI: no tabs, no chrome to fight, just your terminals in folders on the left and a full-height view on the right.
Every terminal's scrollback, working directory, and program are journaled by a
background daemon. Close the app, log out, or reboot — when you come back, the
daemon has already relaunched your terminals and replayed their history above a
restore marker. Nothing to re-open, nothing to re-cd.
Organize terminals into color-tagged folders. Drag to reorder, rename inline, collapse groups. The sidebar is pure hover-reveal chrome — no dividers, no visual noise — with a live activity dot per terminal.
One click zooms out to a card grid of every terminal — live scrolling previews, folder-scoped or all — so you can watch a build, a benchmark, and a server at the same time. Click a card to jump in.
A persistent composer sits under every terminal. Type a command, hit Run, and it executes at the prompt — with history, multi-line editing (Shift+Enter), and a live busy indicator. It covers the prompt row seamlessly, so the terminal reads as one continuous surface.
Every command you run — in any terminal, past or present — lands in a cross-session history you can search and re-run from the composer.
Full-scrollback search with live match highlighting and a match counter — including everything replayed from the journal after a restart.
Pulse recognizes when you launch Claude
Code or Codex inside a terminal,
pins the session identity, and restores it deterministically with --resume
after a restart — never guessing "most recent". The sidebar row shows what the
session is working on, live.
First-class WSL (per-distro) and SSH terminals alongside PowerShell and cmd. SSH terminals auto-reconnect after an unexpected drop, and file drag-and-drop uploads over SFTP. WSL and SSH sessions keep POSIX paths and restore into the right remote directory. Everything spawns from one palette: shells, WSL distros, SSH hosts, recent directories, and fresh or reattached Claude sessions.
Font size, sidebar density, scrollback depth, copy-on-select, paste guards, and per-host permission consents — all in a quiet, modal-light settings surface that matches the app's zero-divider doctrine.
Pulse updates itself in place with Velopack — delta downloads, a branded updating window, and your terminals restored the moment the new version boots. A pre-update backup of your layout is kept automatically.
A companion pulse-ctl.exe controller speaks JSON: list terminals, run commands and
wait for them, read the screen or scrollback, watch live events, and manage
sessions — with scoped tokens for agents. See
docs/controller-api.md.
- Grab the latest
Setup.exefrom the Releases page. - Run it. Pulse installs per-user (no admin prompt), adds a Start Menu shortcut, and launches. Updates are automatic from then on.
The installer is currently unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run — choose More info -> Run anyway. Signing is on the roadmap.
Prerequisites: a recent Rust toolchain (stable, MSVC) on Windows 10/11.
git clone https://github.com/aipulsedaily/pulse
cd pulse
cargo build --releaseThe GUI is target/release/pulse.exe; the controller is
target/release/pulse-ctl.exe. Run the GUI once and it starts its own background
daemon.
Pulse is a single binary with three roles:
- GUI (default) — the egui/wgpu window. Attaches to the daemon over a
loopback TCP socket (length-prefixed
bincode) and renders terminals from a live mirror of the daemon's state. --daemon— a headless broker that owns every ConPTY, streams output to attached clients, and writes an append-only journal per terminal. It answers VT queries, survives the GUI closing, and relaunches terminals on boot.--probe— a built-in self-test suite (pulse-ctl.exeis a thin console companion built from the same crate).
The journal + mirror model is the core idea: the daemon is the single
source of truth on disk, the GUI is a stateless view, and pulse-ctl.exe is a
thin JSON client. Because scrollback lives in journals, any client can reattach at
any time and see the full history.
Design docs for each subsystem live in docs/ — read them for the
why; read the code for the current truth.
- Code signing for the installer (remove the SmartScreen warning)
- A published GitHub Releases feed for auto-updates
- Broader shell hooks and completions
- macOS port (the daemon/journal model is portable; the ConPTY layer and Win32 chrome are the Windows-specific pieces)
Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for build prerequisites, the test/probe suite, and the UI doctrine the project follows. Bug reports and feature requests go through GitHub Issues.
Licensed under either of
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
at your option.
The embedded terminal widget is adapted from egui_term (MIT).
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.