A Windows terminal for Claude Code and AI coding agents
Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Gemini CLI are command-line programs that run for a long time. Wintty Pro keeps them running after the window closes and marks which tab holds which agent.
Several agents at once on Windows
An agent is a program in a terminal, so running five of them means five shells. In Wintty each one gets a tab or a split. Wintty is a native Windows terminal built on the Ghostty terminal core, and it hosts whatever shell you start in it: PowerShell and cmd for agents installed on the Windows side, or a wsl shell in a tab for an agent installed inside a Linux distro. Both kinds can sit in the same window, next to each other.
Tabs and splits are in every tier. What changes in Pro is what happens to those agents when the window goes away.
Agents keep working after you close the app
In Wintty Pro, sessions run in winttyd, a per-user daemon that starts when you log on. Close the last Wintty window and the programs in its sessions keep running, so an agent halfway through a task carries on. Reopen Wintty and the sessions are back with their panes, their layout and their scrollback. An app update that does not change the daemon leaves it running, and the agents run straight through the update. New tabs and splits are persistent by default.
The winttyc command-line tool reaches the same sessions from PowerShell. winttyc list shows them, winttyc tail <name> streams a session's output without attaching to it, winttyc history <name> prints its scrollback, and winttyc send <name> writes to its input. That is enough to check on an agent from a script, or from another terminal.
A Windows reboot ends the sessions and the agents in them. The daemon holds programs across closing the app and across updates, and nothing running survives the machine going down. The persistent sessions docs cover the daemon, the sessions picker and every winttyc verb.
Panes and layouts for many agents
In Pro, the pane tree belongs to the session and the daemon stores it: the tabs in order, the splits with their sizes, and which pane has focus. A session holds up to 64 tabs and each tab up to 64 panes, so a grid of agents with a log and a shell beside them fits in one session. Open the sessions picker in any Wintty window to attach; a session attached elsewhere moves over after a confirm, with its layout intact.
The multiplexer docs describe the pane tree and map the common tmux commands to winttyc.
What Wintty shows about each agent
Wintty Pro watches the programs started from a tab's first shell and recognises coding agents by their process name or command line. 16 are built in, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Cursor's agent CLI, Aider and Goose. When one of them is running from that first shell, the tab's icon changes to that agent's icon, with the profile icon kept as a small overlay, and the tooltip names the agent and the folder it is working in.
There is one icon per tab. An agent started in a split of that tab gets no icon of its own, so if you want every agent labelled, give each one its own tab; with one agent per tab, the tab strip tells you which is which. Detection covers agents running on the Windows side. An agent running inside WSL is not detected, and its tab keeps its usual icon.
An agent the built-in list misses can be added in Settings, matched by process name, command line, or an environment variable. A switch in the same place turns the agent icons off.
The icon says which agent is in a tab. It does not report what the agent is doing: whether it is working, waiting for your input, or finished is in the pane itself.
Compared with tmux, psmux and Zellij
A terminal multiplexer covers the same two needs: many panes, and programs that outlive the window. The difference is where the multiplexer lives and what comes back after a restart.
| Option | How it runs agents on Windows |
|---|---|
| tmux in WSL | Real tmux, for agents installed inside the Linux distro. A reboot or wsl --shutdown ends every session. |
| psmux | A native Windows multiplexer written in Rust. It speaks the tmux command language and reads your .tmux.conf, with no WSL, Cygwin or MSYS2. |
| Zellij | Native on Windows since 0.44, with layouts and plugins. After a quit or a crash, a resurrected session reruns each pane's command once you press Enter. |
| Wintty Pro | The multiplexer is the terminal: no prefix keys, and the daemon keeps the agents running after the app closes. |
Each of the others is the better pick for something. If your agents and your code live in Linux, tmux inside WSL is the real thing. If you want tmux's keys and config on native Windows, psmux is built for that. Zellij has a plugin system, a layout manager and remote attach over HTTPS. Wintty has no status line and no remote attach, and splits are made in the GUI rather than from the command line. The tmux on Windows guide compares every route in more detail, and Wintty vs Windows Terminal covers the terminal most Windows machines already have.
Availability by tier
Tabs and splits are in every tier, including the free source build. Persistent sessions, the multiplexer and agent detection are Pro features, and they are in Pro, Pro Enterprise and Pro Legacy. The tiers page compares everything each tier carries.
Getting Wintty
Signed builds are a thank you for sponsors, and building from source stays free. The Pro tier carries the sessions, the multiplexer and the agent icons. The download page lists the current paths.
Wintty is built on the Ghostty terminal core and is not affiliated with the Ghostty project. We are big fans of Ghostty and hope this work lands in official Ghostty for Windows.