A macOS menu bar app that seats your terminal windows in a tidy grid. Built for developers who keep many AI-CLI sessions open at once — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, plain shells, you name it. When you're juggling a dozen terminals chasing different agents and tasks, TermUsher tiles them so you can see them all, then quietly steps aside.
Click a tile to zoom it for typing — others tuck into a sidebar strip. Drag a terminal's title bar to reorder. ⌘⌥G or hover the top edge of the screen returns to the even grid. The app can also auto-return after you press Enter and go idle (perfect for chat-style LLM workflows). Stop tiling and TermUsher restores each window to where it was before.
Built for the AI-CLI workflow. If your day involves ten Claude Code sessions, three Codex tabs, and a Cursor in the corner, this is for you.
Tech stack: Swift Package Manager · AppKit · ApplicationServices (Accessibility API) · ServiceManagement (Launch at Login) · 24 XCTest cases · GitHub Actions CI on macos-14 · swift build --arch arm64 --arch x86_64 (universal binary).
./build-app.shProduces TermUsher.app in the project root.
cp -R TermUsher.app /Applications/
open /Applications/TermUsher.appOn first launch macOS will prompt for Accessibility permission. Grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, then re-launch.
Click the menu bar icon → Launch at Login. (Uses SMAppService — requires the app to be installed in /Applications.)
Click the grid icon in the menu bar:
- Tile Terminal Windows — lay out every standard Terminal window in an even grid (one grid per display).
- Click any tile → it zooms. Four zoom styles in the Zoom Style submenu:
- Side Strip — focused fills 78% on the left, others stack on the right.
- Full Screen — focused fills the screen entirely.
- Full Column — focused expands vertically only (1/N width × full screen height).
- Disabled — clicking does nothing; the static grid stays put.
- ⌘⌥T — toggle tiling from anywhere.
- ⌘⌥G — return to the even grid (works from any app; doesn't conflict with vim/REPL Esc behavior in Terminal).
- ⌘⌥⇧T — Stop tiling and leave windows where they are (no restore).
- Return to Grid / Refresh Window List — re-tile or re-detect windows (auto-detects most cases).
- Exclude Focused Window — drop the currently-focused tile from tiling and restore its original position. Useful for log tails or monitoring panes that shouldn't move. Re-tile to bring it back.
- Stop Tiling — submenu with two choices: Restore Originals (snap each window back to its position at the moment tiling started) or Leave Where They Are (just stop managing in place).
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
⌘⌥T |
Toggle tiling (start, or Stop & Restore) |
⌘⌥G |
Return to the even grid (cancels a zoom) |
⌘⌥⇧T |
Stop & Leave (windows stay where they are) |
Hotkeys are global — they fire from any app. They use charactersIgnoringModifiers so they map to the physical keys on Dvorak / AZERTY / QWERTZ as well as US-QWERTY.
Three triggers can return a zoomed window to the grid without you reaching for a hotkey, all toggleable in the Auto Return to Grid submenu:
- After 5 min idle — no input on screen for 5 minutes → grid.
- On hover at top edge — move mouse to the very top of the screen for 0.3s → grid.
- After ⏎ + 3s idle — press Return inside the zoomed window, then no further keystrokes for 3 seconds → grid. Best for Claude-CLI / chat-style usage where you send a message and wait for output.
All three are off by default. Enable any combination.
While tiled, drag a Terminal window's title bar to move it. On release, TermUsher snaps it into the closest grid slot and swaps with whatever was there. Order persists for the session — restarting tiling resets to the original order.
- New Terminal windows are auto-detected and added to the grid (~150ms after they appear).
- Closed windows are dropped automatically; if only one Terminal window remains, tiling stops and that window is restored.
- Windows on multiple displays tile within their own display (no cross-display merging).
- "Restore Originals" snaps each window back to the position it had at the moment tiling started — not to a pre-Terminal-Tiler factory default.
- Menu bar icon is there but tiling does nothing. Accessibility permission isn't granted to this exact build. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility — if TermUsher isn't listed, drag the app in; if it's listed but off, toggle it on. The hotkey monitor retries every ~1.5s, so you don't need to relaunch the app afterwards.
⌘⌥Tdoes nothing. Same as above — global key monitoring is gated by Accessibility.- Tile button shows "Too many Terminal windows". With more than ~16 windows on a single display the grid cells become unreadable. Move some windows to another display, or close a few.
- One Terminal window stays tiled fullscreen after closing siblings. This shouldn't happen — the app stops and restores when the count drops below 2. If it does, click Stop & Restore Originals in the menu.
- Terminal.app only. iTerm2, Ghostty, Alacritty, and Warp use different AX subroles or aren't standard windows; they aren't detected.
- Single-instance. Launching a second copy will alert and quit.
- Ad-hoc signed. Distributing the prebuilt
.appoutside this Mac will trip Gatekeeper. Build from source with./build-app.shinstead.
- macOS 13+
- Swift 5.9+
- Apple Silicon or Intel (the build script produces a native binary)
MIT