toowl

Documentation

Quickstart

Five minutes from install to splits, the Perch, the palette, and your first daemon-backed workspace.

This is the fast lane. In about five minutes you'll install toowl, open the Perch, split a few panes, search every action from the palette, and spin up your first daemon-backed workspace. Every key shown lists both the macOS and the Linux/Windows binding, so pick whichever line matches your machine.

  1. Install. The fast path is the one-liner below; for platform detail see Installation. Linux gets a prebuilt binary; macOS and Windows build from source via Homebrew or cargo. 
    curl -fsSL https://toowl.dev/install.sh | sh
  2. Launch it. Run toowl. On a desktop you get the GPU-accelerated window (cold start under 80ms on Apple Silicon, around 80MB idle); over SSH or on a headless box the very same binary drops you into the tmux-style TUI automatically.
  3. Open the Perch (the sidebar). Press Ctrl+Shift+B on every platform. The Claude Feather is already waiting there, putting your Claude Code sessions one click away.
  4. Split panes. Vertical split is Cmd+D (macOS) / Ctrl+Shift+D (Linux/Windows); horizontal is Cmd+Shift+D / Ctrl+Shift+E. Move focus between panes with Cmd+Opt+H/J/K/L / Ctrl+Alt+H/J/K/L, or just use the arrow keys.
  5. New tab or window. A new tab (it inherits the current working directory) is Cmd+T / Ctrl+Shift+T. A fresh window is Cmd+N / Ctrl+Shift+N.
  6. Command palette. Press Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P to fuzzy-search every action toowl can do. When you forget a binding, this is the place to look.
  7. Start a daemon-backed workspace. Run toowl up dev to open a named window owned by toowld, the daemon. Close that window and the workspace simply detaches; its sessions keep running. Run toowl up dev again to reattach right where you left off. The same flow works against remote hosts, where an @host badge appears in the title.
  8. Make it yours. Pick a theme by editing ~/.config/toowl/config.toml. The change hot-reloads in roughly 150ms with no restart. 
    [appearance]
theme = "toowl_moonlight"
Coming from another terminal? Ctrl+C sends SIGINT to the running program, the standard terminal convention, so it does not copy. To copy your selection use Cmd+C / Ctrl+Shift+C instead.

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