InciseTerminal · agentsWhere your agents actually run
Coding agents are command-line programs. Claude Code, Antigravity, and Codex all run in a shell — and then they propose edits, which you have to read somewhere. So the work splits across two apps, and you spend the day moving between them.
Incise is both halves. A real login shell, several of them, with the editor those agents drive in the same window. It is a native Swift app, not a browser pretending to be one, and it is free.
A terminal-first window
The editor is not the point here; the terminal is, and the editor is what you turn to when an agent hands you something to read.
Give the terminal the whole window
⌃⌥` collapses the editor entirely. Most of the day the agent's output is what you're reading, so it gets the space; the editor comes back the moment you need it.
One tab per task
A tab for the agent, a tab for the dev server, a plain zsh for everything else. ⌘` cycles them. New tabs open in the folder you have open, so there's no cd first.
Name them, colour them
Rename a tab so you can tell claude from agy at a glance, and give any tab its own colour scheme from the eleven built in.
It tells you when an agent stops
Agents go quiet for minutes, then need you. A background tab that finishes or wants input shows a dot — and if Incise isn't frontmost, you get a notification, so you can stop babysitting it.
Still there tomorrow
Terminal tabs, names, and layout come back on relaunch, along with your editor tabs and unsaved notes.
Put it where you want
Dock the terminal below the editor, to either side, or above it. Drag the divider; it remembers.
The agent drives the editor beside it
This is the part another terminal cannot do. The agent running in Incise’s terminal can open a file in Incise’s editor, at the right lines, read whatever you have selected, and put a proposed change on screen as a diff with Accept and Reject buttons. You never paste a path, and you never read a patch in a scrollback buffer.
Claude Code connects with /ide. Everything else — Antigravity, Codex, Cursor, VS Code — connects over MCP, the open standard those tools already speak. Both are off until you switch them on, both listen only on your own machine, and neither sends anything anywhere.
Should this replace your terminal?
Probably not all of it, and that is fine. If you have settled on Ghostty, iTerm, or WezTerm, keep it. Those are terminals by trade and they are very good at it.
One thing they have that Incise does not, so you hear it here rather than find out later:
- No splits. Incise has terminal tabs, not panes side by side within the terminal. If your muscle memory is a split every few minutes, you will feel it.
Scrollback search used to be on that list. It isn’t any more: ⌘F searches terminal output with match-case, whole-word, and regex, and ⌘G steps through the hits.
What Incise has instead is the editor, and an agent that can drive it. That is the trade. For a long agent session it is a good one; for tailing logs across four panes it is not, and nothing stops you keeping both apps open.
Which edition
The terminal ships in the Homebrew and direct-download builds. The Mac App Store build cannot have one, because Apple’s sandbox forbids launching a shell — the terminal page covers that, and how to move across if you started there. Agent integration works in both.
Version 1.12.19macOS 13.0+Notarized & signed