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Magic Coder
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Terminal (TUI)

The TUI is Magic Coder’s primary surface. It’s a single-binary CLI called coder, runs in any modern terminal on macOS or Linux, and connects to your BridgeApp account over a secure session.

If you’re getting started, this is the surface to use.

What you get

Section titled “What you get”
  • A native terminal UI with a transcript, input box, and status line.
  • Slash commands for everything — model, reasoning effort, theme, login state, exit.
  • A local tool runtime that lets the agent read your files, edit them with diffs, run shell commands, and manage long-running background processes — all confined to the workspace roots you point it at.
  • Trust + permission rules so the agent prompts before doing anything irreversible (until you tell it not to).
  • Resumable threads — exit a session and pick it up later, possibly on a different machine.

Installing

Section titled “Installing”
Terminal window
brew tap MathAndMagic/magic-coder
brew install magic-coder

Or grab a binary from the releases page. Full instructions on Install.

Running

Section titled “Running”
Terminal window
coder

A walkthrough of an interactive session: Your first session.

What works well

Section titled “What works well”
  • Long-running tasks. The TUI is the surface that holds up under multi-hour autonomous runs — agent loops, big refactors, debugging marathons.
  • Headless and remote. Works over SSH, in tmux/screen, in CI runners. --no-open-browser covers the case where the box can’t open a browser for sign-in.
  • Composability. It’s just a binary. Wrap it in scripts, Make targets, CI jobs — coder is well-behaved as a command.

What it doesn’t have

Section titled “What it doesn’t have”
  • A graphical file picker. It’s a terminal UI; everything is keyboard-driven.
  • Native voice input or rich media. Output is text and diffs.
  • Mouse-first interactions. Mouse wheel scrolls; right-click copies blocks where the terminal forwards it. Otherwise the keyboard is the primary input.

If those are dealbreakers, look at the desktop app or VS Code extension — they’re maturing.

Supported terminals

Section titled “Supported terminals”

Most modern terminals work. Specifically tested:

  • iTerm2, Terminal.app, Ghostty, Alacritty, kitty (macOS)
  • GNOME Terminal, Konsole, Alacritty, kitty (Linux)
  • WezTerm (cross-platform)

The right-click-to-copy gesture depends on whether your terminal forwards right-clicks to the TUI. If yours doesn’t, use your terminal’s normal text-selection.

Where to next

Section titled “Where to next”