The Termio server

What runs on a machine so sessions outlive the app — how termiod is installed, kept alive, updated in place, and inspected when something looks wrong.

Every session runs inside termiod, the Termio server, on the machine that owns it — including the ones on this Mac. The app, the iPhone companion and the CLI are all viewers: they attach to a session and detach from it. Nothing about a session belongs to the window you were looking at.

That is the whole reason quitting Termio does not kill your agents.

What it is

termiod is a session host, not a window manager. It owns the PTY, keeps the scrollback, and hands a viewer a snapshot when one attaches. Locally a viewer reaches it over a Unix socket; remotely the app opens an SSH pipe to the same binary on the far box. One protocol, both ways — which is why a session on a VPS behaves like a session here.

Panes, splits and layout are the app's business and never the server's.

Getting it onto a machine

Adding a box under Settings ▸ Devices and pressing Set Up copies one binary into ~/.local/bin over SSH and starts it. There is no package to install and no root involved.

termiod deploy                      # install or update it here, then verify
termiod deploy --host mybox         # same, over your own SSH config

deploy is the only install path, and it is a reconcile: run it against a box in any state and it ends in the same one. Termio reads ~/.ssh/config to find the host, so a machine you can already ssh to needs nothing new. See Devices.

Keeping it running

termiod service install    # launchd on macOS, systemd --user on Linux

Without a service the server lives as long as your login session. With one it comes back after a crash and after a reboot, which is what you want on a box you only ever reach remotely.

Updating without dropping sessions

A new build replaces the running one in place: the process keeps its id and its PTYs, and the sessions never notice.

termiod handoff

That is also what happens when the app updates itself — the reason a Termio update does not cost you your running agents.

Looking at it

Three commands answer nearly every "is it me or is it Termio" question:

Command	What it tells you
`termiod status`	What this machine has: the binary, its version, and whether a daemon is answering on the socket.
`termiod list`	The sessions the host is holding — add `--host <box>` to ask another machine.
`termiod logs`	What the server recorded while nobody was attached. `-f` follows it; `--path` prints the file for a bug report.

termiod is the server's own command, and separate from the termio command-line tool the app installs for you. You rarely need termiod by hand — the app runs these for you — but it is there when a box is misbehaving and you want to look rather than guess.

Stopping it

termiod stop

It declines while a command is still running or a viewer is attached, so a stray stop cannot take an agent's work with it. Sessions end when their process ends, or when you close them.