A calmer, more productive terminal.
A fast, native terminal built on Ghostty, for everyday work. Run a fleet of agents or just a shell. Flow stays deliberately minimal and simple, with no accounts and no telemetry.
Native and fast. Flow is a Swift and AppKit app powered by libghostty. There is no Electron and no web view.
Made for agents. Flow shows what Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode are doing in each workspace, and tells you when one finishes or needs you. See Agents.
Private and simple. No account, no telemetry, no tracking. Your terminal is yours.
Flow needs macOS 14 or later.
- Download the latest
.dmgfrom releases. - Open it and drag Flow into Applications.
- Open Flow.
Flow updates itself.
Each project gets its own workspace in the sidebar, with its own tabs and split panes. A workspace is named after the git repository it's in, with its path and branch underneath. Flow reopens everything as you left it.
After a relaunch, restored terminals start when you first view them. Once started, they keep running when you switch to another tab or workspace.
Drag workspaces up or down in the sidebar to reorder them. Flow remembers their order when you reopen it.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⌘N | New workspace |
| ⌘T | New tab |
| ⌘D | Split right |
| ⌘1–9 | Switch workspace |
| ⌘, | Settings |
Click the ? button in the title bar to see every shortcut. The docs list them too.
Run claude, codex or opencode in a Flow terminal and the workspace shows what it is doing:
| Dot | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Blue, pulsing | The agent is working |
| Yellow | The agent is waiting for you |
| Green | A turn finished while you were looking elsewhere |
Looking at the terminal clears the green dot. A terminal you are not looking at also gets a macOS notification, which focuses it when clicked, and a sound: one when an agent needs you, another when it finishes. Pick the sounds, or turn them and the notifications off, in Settings › Notifications.
Flow does this through the agents' own hooks and plugins, added to each launch and nothing else. It never writes to ~/.claude, ~/.codex or ~/.config/opencode, and an agent started outside Flow behaves exactly as before. There is nothing to set up for fish and zsh. Two things need a step from you:
Bash. Flow cannot add itself to bash. Put this at the end of ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile:
[ -n "$FLOW_FLW" ] && source "${FLOW_FLW%/*}/../Resources/shell-integration/bash/flow.bash"Codex. Codex runs a hook only after you have reviewed it. The first time you start codex in Flow, run /hooks inside it and trust the Flow hooks. Codex remembers your answer, and asks again only if Flow moves to a different location or an update changes its hooks.
To run an agent without Flow's hooks for one session, start it with FLOW_AGENTS_DISABLED=1.
Choose Flow › Settings… (⌘,) to pick the shell, a theme for light mode and one for dark mode, the font, cursor, window opacity and blur, and agent sounds. The sidebar and title bar follow the theme, so a dark theme gets a dark sidebar even in light mode.
Settings writes to ~/.config/flow/config, a plain text file in Ghostty's format that you can also edit by hand. The first time Flow opens, it copies your Ghostty config into this file, so your fonts, theme and keybindings carry over. After that, Flow reads only its own file. Settings changes only the lines it needs to and keeps your comments. Settings › Advanced opens the file in your editor and lists any problems in it. See Configuration for more.
Flow aims to support every Ghostty setting, but some don't work in Flow yet. If a setting you rely on has no effect, open an issue.
You need Xcode 27, Zig 0.15.2 and xcodegen (brew install zig@0.15 xcodegen). Use Homebrew's Zig: the upstream 0.15.2 build can't link against the Xcode 26.4 and later SDKs.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/thetinygoat/flow.git && cd flow
./scripts/build-ghosttykit.sh # builds libghostty, slow, only needed once
xcodegen generate # writes flow.xcodeproj from project.yml
open flow.xcodeprojTo build without opening Xcode, run xcodebuild -scheme flow -configuration Debug build.
Vendor/ghostty is a git submodule pinned to Ghostty's latest stable release. patches/ holds build fixes for Xcode 27 that landed upstream after that release, and the build script applies them.
xcodebuild test -scheme flow -destination 'platform=macOS'The tests cover the models and terminal lifecycle without launching the app.
| Directory | Contents |
|---|---|
Sources/Ghostty/ |
The wrapper around libghostty's C API, with the runtime, config, input and terminal view |
Sources/Workspace/ |
The workspace, tab and pane model. It's generic over PaneLeaf, so tests run without terminals. |
Sources/Agent/ |
Each terminal's agent status, its notifications and sounds, and the socket agents report to |
Sources/Settings/ |
The Settings window and the reader and writer for Flow's config file |
Sources/UI/ |
The AppKit window, with the sidebar on the left and terminals on the right |
Tests/ |
Unit tests for the model |
Vendor/GhosttyKit.xcframework and Vendor/GhosttyResources are build outputs and aren't committed.
Flow is released under the MIT License. Third-party licenses are in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.