termdeck
Documentation
Termdeck
Termdeck is a browser control plane for coding agents that run on machines you own. It drives the real Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and xAI Grok CLIs on your laptop, desktop, or build box, and gives you one window to watch them, approve their tool calls, review their diffs, and pick a session back up from your phone.
Quickstart
Sign up, connect your first machine, and send a prompt. Around five minutes, most of which is the CLI login.
Start hereInstall the agent
One command per machine, on macOS, Linux, and Windows. What it writes, what it registers, and how to remove it.
Read the guideHow it works
The master, the thin agent, and why your transcripts never leave the machine that wrote them.
Understand the modelTroubleshooting
Machine offline, empty model picker, a turn that will not start, notifications that never arrive. Symptom first, fix attached.
Find your symptomWhat Termdeck is
Coding agents are excellent at long jobs and terrible at being watched. A run takes twenty minutes, stops after four to ask whether it may run npm test, and then sits there until you walk back to the desk. Meanwhile the transcript that would tell you what happened is a scrollback buffer inside one terminal window on one machine.
Termdeck puts a browser in front of that. Your machine keeps running the CLI you already installed, under the subscription you already pay for, against the repository that is already checked out. Termdeck reads what the CLI writes to disk, streams the live turn on top, and gives you the controls: send a prompt, approve or deny a tool call, stop a run, read the diff, switch account, check what it cost.
Termdeck does not replace your coding agent. It is the interface and control layer for the official CLIs. You keep your Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI access, your local tools, your MCP servers, and your model choices. Model tokens bill to those providers, never to Termdeck.
What you need
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| A Termdeck account | Free, no card. Every new account starts on a 14 day Pro trial and drops to Free automatically. |
| Node.js 18 or newer | On each machine you want to connect. The agent is a small Node process. |
| At least one coding CLI | Claude Code, Codex, or Grok, installed and signed in on that machine. |
| An outbound HTTPS connection | The agent dials out to Termdeck. No inbound port, no tunnel, no firewall rule. |
Windows, macOS, and Linux are all supported. The machine can be a laptop, a desktop, a virtual machine, a home server, or a cloud development box. It does not need a public address.
The shape of the system
There are exactly two moving parts.
- The master at
termdeck.ioserves the web app, holds your account, and routes messages. It stores no transcripts and runs no coding CLI of its own. - The agent runs on each of your machines. It opens one outbound WebSocket to the master and answers a fixed set of narrow requests: read a transcript file, watch a folder, start one of the known engines, relay its output.
Everything you see in the browser is assembled from those two. The full picture, including why the agent is deliberately small and what it will refuse to do, is in How Termdeck works.
Pick a path
Approvals
Permission modes across three engines, risk scoring, auto allow rules, and the refusals you cannot switch off by accident.
Phone access
Install the app, turn on push, and unblock a waiting run from wherever you are.
Multiple accounts
Connect every Claude and ChatGPT login you have, watch their limits side by side, and switch mid chat.
Cost and usage
Tokens and API equivalent cost per project, per model, per day, drilling down to a single run.
Reviewing work
Diffs, the project file browser, checkpoint restore, and a factual recap of what a chat actually did.
Security
What crosses the wire, what the agent will and will not do, and how to think about the trust boundary.
Conventions in these docs
Commands are shown for macOS and Linux first, then Windows PowerShell, in tabs that stay in step across every page. Pick your platform once and the rest of the documentation follows.
A feature that needs a paid plan carries a marker like this: Starter. Everything without a marker works on Free. Plans and limits has the full table.
Press Ctrl K anywhere in the documentation to jump to the page filter.