Everything you run in Termio lives in the sidebar on the left. It's one scrollable list, grouped into sections, where every row is a live session reporting what it's doing right now. Click a row to bring it forward; the rest keep running in the background.
Sections
The sidebar groups your sessions by what they are:
- Terminals — standalone shells and agents you start with
⌘T, not tied to a project. Your scratchpad. - Chats — throwaway agent sessions for quick questions (see below).
- Projects — the folders you've opened. Each project expands to the sessions running inside it, and any git worktrees nest one level deeper, giving a three-level tree: project → worktree → session. See Git worktrees.
Empty sections stay hidden, so the list only shows what you're actually using.
Status
Every session row carries a status dot that updates live. There are four states:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| working | The agent is actively producing output. |
| idle | Waiting for you — nothing pending. |
| attention | Blocked on a question or a permission prompt. Go back. |
| done | Finished a task while you were on another session — a calm "ready" cue, so you notice a completed run without it shouting for attention. |
The distinction between attention and done is the point: attention means an agent is stuck and can't proceed without you; done means it finished on its own and is just letting you know. Termio derives these from the agent's own hooks where it exposes them and from terminal output otherwise — Session control covers the opt-in hooks that make them sharpest.
Start a long run, switch away, and let the status dots do the watching. When a row flips to attention you know to jump back; when it flips to done the work landed while you were elsewhere.
Chats
The Chats section holds scratch agent sessions — for when you want to ask an
agent something without opening a project. Press ⌘N for a New Chat and it
starts in a shared scratch directory (~/.termio/chats), never in whatever folder
you happen to be in. Close them individually, or clear the lot from the section's
menu. Treat them as disposable: quick questions, throwaway experiments, nothing
you need to keep.
Switching without losing your place
Because each session is a real process, an agent doesn't pause when it's
off-screen. Click between rows freely, or — once you have more than a handful —
jump straight to any session by name with ⌘⇧O. See
Navigation.