# cordless v0.8: Tab Groups, Custom Launchers & Bring-Your-Own Copilot

> Source: <https://dev.to/naveenneog/cordless-v08-tab-groups-custom-launchers-bring-your-own-copilot-2i0b>
> Published: 2026-07-13 14:51:24+00:00

TL;DR—[cordless]is a CLI-first tool that manages your remote terminal / coding-agent sessions and puts them on your phone.v0.8is aboutorganisingthe swarm:Chrome-mobile-style tab groups,custom launchers(bring any command as a profile), a built-inGitHub Copilot CLIprofile,renameable tabs, andpersisted scrollback historyso a reopened session after a reboot shows what it was doing. There's also a properinstaller. Six features, each on its own branch — designed with`cordless setup`

GPT-5.6 Sol, built withGitHub Copilot CLI.

v0.7 taught cordless to tell me *which* of my eight agent sessions needs me. v0.8 is the next problem: once you're running that many, they stop fitting on the screen. You need to **organise** them — like browser tabs, because that was the whole metaphor from day one. So this release is six features that make a big session swarm manageable.

The headline. Sessions can now live in **named, colored groups** — think "API migration", "Website", "Flaky tests" — exactly like Chrome mobile's tab groups.

In the terminal dashboard, groups render as **collapsible headers** with a live per-group waiting/session count:

```
── Sessions (6) ──
▼ API migration          2 waiting · 3 sessions
  ! claude   build pipeline            waiting
  ● codex    api tests                 working
  ○ shell    api ~/src/api             idle
▶ Website                              2 sessions
▼ Ungrouped                            1 session
    ○ copilot scratch                  idle
```

Press `g`

for the group menu (new / assign / ungroup / collapse / rename / delete), and `f`

to cycle a **smart-view filter** — `All · Attention · Claude · Codex · Copilot · Shell`

. Those filters are *views*, not groups; collapse state is per-device. On the **phone** you get the same idea as a chip strip above the tabs (All · Unread · one chip per group, with counts and color dots) plus rename/move in the details sheet.

The design decision I kept going back and forth on — and where Sol was firm — was **manual groups over continuous auto-grouping**. Auto-sorting your tabs by directory sounds clever until a session changes cwd and silently jumps groups. So groups are something you *choose*; deleting one never kills its sessions, it just ungroups them.

Until now cordless had three profiles: `shell`

, `claude`

, `codex`

. v0.8 makes profiles **yours**. Drop this in `~/.cordless/config.json`

:

```
"profiles": {
  "api": { "command": "pwsh", "args": ["-NoLogo"], "cwd": "C:/src/api" },
  "notes": { "command": "nvim", "args": ["~/notes.md"] }
}
```

…and `cordless new api`

spawns it directly (resolved against the daemon's `PATH`

, not a shell string — no `sh -c`

injection surface). A missing executable doesn't crash anything; it shows as **unavailable** with a reason, and `cordless profiles`

lists every launcher with its source and availability.

And because the agent world moved, v0.8 ships a built-in ** copilot** profile — the standalone

`claude`

and `codex`

. The nice part: attention detection is now `copilot`

(and any custom profile you tag `attentionPreset: "agent"`

) gets the same Small feature, big daily quality-of-life. `cordless rename <id> "API migration"`

, or the dashboard `e`

key, or a long-press on the phone. Titles are Unicode-normalized, control-stripped and length-capped, an empty title restores the generated default, and the change **broadcasts live** to every connected client (with a monotonic revision so a stale update can't clobber a newer one).

This is the one that turned into a proper engineering story. A cordless session already survives a *daemon restart* (it reopens the same shell in the same directory). But it came back **blank** — you lost the scrollback. v0.8 fixes that: the daemon persists a **capped, plain-text** copy of each session's scrollback (2000 lines / 512 KB, gzipped, user-only) and, on restore, shows it as **frozen context above** the reopened session with a `── session reopened after system restart ──`

banner.

A couple of decisions worth calling out:

Here's the part I'm glad CI caught. My persisted-history tests were **green on Windows** and I shipped v0.8.0. The **Linux and macOS** CLI builds went red on the exact same test.

The cause is a lovely cross-platform trap. On a graceful stop, the daemon catches `SIGTERM`

and runs `shutdown()`

: it saves each session's history, then kills the PTYs. Killing a PTY fires its exit handler — and *that* handler deleted the just-saved history **and** rewrote the "reopen these on restart" manifest without the now-exited session. So on Linux the session came back with no history; on macOS it didn't come back at all.

Why did Windows pass? Because on Windows `SIGTERM`

from another process is an **uncatchable hard-kill** — `shutdown()`

never runs, the exit handler never fires, and the periodically-flushed history file just… survives. The platform that "worked" only worked by accident.

The fix is a `_shuttingDown`

flag so the exit handler preserves history and the manifest during a graceful stop. What I like about it: I reproduced the Linux-only failure **on Windows** by driving `shutdown()`

directly in a unit test (the harness's `SIGTERM`

can't), so the regression is now locked shut on every platform. Re-tagged, rebuilt, and v0.8.0 went out clean with the full asset set.

Same loop, tightened further: **me on GitHub Copilot CLI, GPT-5.6 Sol as the design partner** — and this time with a rule I'm keeping for good: **every feature on its own branch, merged --no-ff, with clean well-documented code**. The v0.8 program was six branches (

`feature/persisted-history`

, `feature/custom-profiles`

, `feature/copilot-profile`

, `feature/session-rename`

, `feature/session-groups`

, `feature/group-ui-phone`

) plus a `fix/history-shutdown`

. The daemon's test harness grew to The feeling I was chasing: open cordless with a dozen agents running and not feel underwater. The waiting ones surface (v0.7); the rest are **filed into groups** you named, launched from **profiles** you defined, titled how *you* think about them — and if the box reboots overnight, each one comes back **with its history intact**. It's the browser-tabs promise, finally delivered for a swarm of terminals.

`cordless setup`

*Part of the #AI4Good series. Built one day at a time. — @naveenneog*