Tortie

A calm agent multiplexer with familiar IDE features, for macOS, with an iPhone app.

If you run coding agents in VS Code or Cursor terminals, but you're tired of cmd+`'ing between windows and losing running agents to every restart, Tortie is for you. I built it to scratch my own itch. I don't want an agent super app, and I don't want to think about tmux. I just want all of my projects in one window and be able to easily organize and not lose my agent sessions.

Explore Tortie, read the docs and compare agent tools at tortie.sh →

One window for every project Every project is a tab with its own sessions, Git state, file tree and editor. Use ⌘P to find files in the active project or across every open project. Docs →
Agents keep working Quit Tortie without stopping the work. Named sessions run outside the app window and return when you reopen it. Docs →
Resume the conversation After a restart, Tortie replays the scrollback and prepares each agent's own resume command. You choose when to reconnect the conversation. Docs →
Jump to what needs you Working agents stay quiet. Press ⌘J to jump to the session waiting for input, even when another project is open. Docs →
Catch Me Up Press ⇧⌘U to see every session in a project at a glance. Open one to read your asks and the agent's closing answers from its own log, then jump back to any exchange. The conversation stays word for word. An optional model can write only the one-line project summary. Docs →

Tortie includes 13 built-in CLI agent profiles you can run in durable sessions.

Claude Code   Codex   Cursor CLI   opencode   Gemini CLI   Qwen Code   Muse Code   Pi   Oh My Pi   CodeWhale   Antigravity   Droid   Grok

See launch, resume and conversation support for every agent →

Need another CLI? Add it with one JSON file—no rebuild required. Tortie asks before a new definition starts a process. The bundled SpecStory integration can capture supported conversations as Markdown.

Your sessions keep running on your Mac. The iPhone app lets you check on them and answer them when you are away from it.

• See what needs you. Every session on your Mac, with the ones waiting on you first, grouped by project.
• Open a session's terminal. Scroll back through what it printed and type into it, with keys for Esc, Tab, the arrows, Control and Return. Turn the phone sideways to see the terminal alone.
• Answer with a tap. A numbered question from Claude Code or Codex gets one button per answer, and you can send an idle session a message as if you had typed it at your Mac.
• Catch up, then end it. Read what a session said and where it stands, and end one or several sessions behind Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode.
• No account and no server of ours. You pair once by scanning a code in Tortie on your Mac. The app then talks only to that Mac, through Tailscale on it, encrypted from your phone to your Mac. It collects nothing (privacy).

You need an Apple silicon Mac running Tortie 0.111.1 or later, awake with Tortie open, with Tailscale signed in, and an iPhone on iOS 18.1 or later. Join the beta on TestFlight →

• A full Git sidebar. Stage, commit, browse branches and history, and inspect a rich commit graph built from VS Code's parsers. See GitHub Actions runs when the GitHub CLI is installed.
• Click a file, see the diff. Monaco opens modified files as a diff against HEAD by default, and plain editing is a toggle away.
• A decorated file tree. See Git status colors and familiar file icons, then drag files in from Finder or out to another app.
• Search everything at once. ripgrep across every open project, fast on large trees.
• Rich previews. Markdown and HTML render in place. Untrusted pages open in a sandboxed frame with no scripts and no network.
• Read an agent's prose edits as a redline. Open a Markdown or text file in the Redline tab and every change since the last commit is marked up in place, the way you would mark up a document. For a file git does not know, it marks everything since you opened it. It redraws itself when an agent writes to the file. Point at one change, press a key, and that phrase alone goes back while every other edit stands — or accept them all. You can type in the redline too.
• Context for every agent. See each agent's skills, MCP servers, hooks, plugins and instruction files, and install skills through Skills.sh.

• Open a folder on another computer as a project tab. Pick the machine from your tailnet or type its address in Settings, and Tortie signs in, finds tmux and sets the machine up with one Add. The file tree, search, ⌘P, Git sidebar and GitHub Actions runs all read from that machine.
• Run agents there. Start a session on the machine, see what is already running, scroll back through it as you would on your Mac, and get it back after a restart with its resume command waiting.
• Edit as you would locally. Save, rename, make files and folders, stage and commit in any project you open there, with nothing to switch on. Tortie never writes in a home folder itself or inside .git or .ssh.
• Nothing gets installed over there. Tortie uses that machine's own tmux over ssh, and can make and install a key for you.

Works with Macs and with Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 and Debian 12 and 13, on the tmux they ship (3.2a or newer). The machine needs ssh, and on a Mac, Remote Login turned on.

• It does not touch your own tmux server or ~/.tmux.conf, on this Mac or on a machine you add.
• It does not render a key file or anything that looks like a secret as a friendly preview.
• It does not run third-party plugin code inside its own processes. Adding an agent is configuration, not code.

macOS on Apple silicon. Nothing has to be installed first. Tortie carries its own copy of tmux, so a fresh Mac needs no Homebrew and no command line setup.

1. Download the latest release and open the DMG.
2. Drag Tortie to Applications and open it.
3. Point it at a project folder. A git repository gets the full sidebar; any folder works.

1. Join the beta on TestFlight and install Tortie for iPhone.
2. In Tortie on your Mac, open Settings, then Phone, and follow the three steps: get Tailscale, publish this Mac, and pair your phone. The first code can take a few minutes while your Mac's name reaches the internet.
3. Scan the code with the app, check that the six groups match on both screens, and press Allow on your Mac.

Tortie is deliberately assembled from open source rather than written from scratch. The code it owns is the durability layer and the glue.

• tmux holds the sessions. It is the reason your agents survive. Tortie ships its own copy, so the version is chosen by the release and not by whatever the machine happens to have.
• Electron is the window.
• xterm.js draws the terminals.
• Monaco is the editor, the same one inside VS Code.
• Pierre's @pierre/trees and @pierre/diffs render the file tree and the diffs.
• markdown-it renders the Markdown previews, and Shiki highlights the code inside them.
• jsdiff finds the changed words, which is what the redline draws.
• ripgrep runs the search.
• VS Code is the source of the vendored git parsers, fuzzy scorer, commit graph layout and codicons, all with attribution.
• material-icon-theme supplies the file icons.
• better-sqlite3 stores the session manifest.
• node-pty connects the shells.
• skills.sh installs and manages the skills behind the Context view.
• SpecStory captures agent conversations.

The full list with licenses is in NOTICE.

• Philosophy: docs/ZEN-OF-TORTIE.md
• Why Tortie is dependable: WHY-TORTIE-IS-DEPENDABLE.md
• Release notes: CHANGELOG.md
• Building from source and contributing: DEVELOPMENT.md
• License: Apache 2.0, see LICENSE and NOTICE

Tortie is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the companies whose products it launches. All product names and logos are the property of their respective owners, and are used here only to identify the supported product.

Read the Tortie product documentation →

Made by gregce.
Your sessions are never interrupted.