Two related, opt-in features sit behind the live statuses you see in the sidebar:
status hooks that let agents report what they're doing, and the termio
command-line tool that lets you — or another agent — drive sessions from the
shell. Neither is required to use Termio; both make a fleet of agents easier to
run.
Session control
Termio can install small status hooks into your agents' own config files (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the plugin-based agents). When an agent starts working, finishes, or stops to ask a question, the hook reports that to Termio, so the sidebar's status dots reflect exactly what's happening instead of being guessed from output.
Turn it on from Settings ▸ Agents (Termio also offers it once on first launch). Toggling it off removes the hooks again, leaving any hooks you added yourself untouched.
Session control only writes the status hooks into agent configs on your Mac. Nothing leaves your machine — the reports travel over a local socket to the Termio app, and nowhere else.
The termio command-line tool
Install the CLI from Settings ▸ General ▸ Install Command-Line Tool. It
symlinks a termio command onto your PATH (at /usr/local/bin/termio; macOS
asks for permission once).
Open a project
termio # open the current directory as a project
termio ~/code/myapp # open a specific folderRun it in any directory and Termio brings that folder into the sidebar — the shell equivalent of Open Project.
Drive sessions
The termio sessions family lets one agent see and steer its siblings in the same
project — the machinery behind multi-agent workflows. Add --json to any command
for machine-readable output.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
termio sessions list | List the sessions in this project with their live status. |
termio sessions send <id> "<text>" | Type a prompt into a session and submit it. |
termio sessions answer <id> "<text>" | Answer a session's menu or permission prompt. |
termio sessions start <agent> | Start a new session with the named agent. |
termio sessions stop <id> | Close a session. |
<id> is the short id from list (a session title also works). Commands are
scoped to the current project automatically.
This is what lets one agent hand work to another — kick off a task in a sibling
session, then poll termio sessions list until it reports done and read the
result. An agent orchestrating other agents, all on your own machine.