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

Cordless v0.8 introduces tab groups, custom launchers, and a built-in GitHub Copilot CLI profile for managing remote terminal and coding-agent sessions. The update adds named, colored session groups, renameable tabs, and persisted scrollback history that survives daemon restarts. Custom launchers allow users to define any command as a profile, and the new copilot profile includes attention detection for agent sessions.

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