Sessions & terminals

Once paired, the phone shows a live list of every open terminal on your Mac.

The session list

Each entry is one live shell. The list updates in real time — open a new terminal on your Mac and it appears on the phone without a refresh; close one and it drops off. Because the hook is at the shell layer, this includes:

• iTerm2 and Terminal.app windows and tabs
• The integrated terminals inside VS Code, Zed, and Cursor
• tmux panes

Tap any entry to attach.

Attaching

When you attach, you see the real terminal — full color, live output, exactly what’s on the Mac screen. Whatever the shell is running (vim, htop, tmux, a build with a progress bar) renders untouched, because TermBridge passes the raw VT bytes through rather than re-rendering them.

You’re not watching a recording. Type on your phone and the keystrokes go straight into the real shell. Send Ctrl-C, answer an agent’s prompt, kick off a new command — it’s the same session your Mac has.

Scrollback replay

Every shell keeps a rolling scrollback buffer (256 KiB per shell). When you attach — or re-attach after a disconnect — TermBridge replays what you missed, so you’re never dropped into a blank screen mid-build. Detach and the shell keeps running on your Mac the whole time.

Detaching

Closing the terminal view on your phone just detaches — the shell on your Mac is unaffected and keeps running. Re-attach any time and the scrollback catches you up.

Next

Learn the mobile controls that make a terminal usable with thumbs.