taiku

taiku is a terminal workspace that lets you share live shell sessions with anyone, instantly. You run a single command on your machine, get a URL, and collaborators join your terminal in their browser, with no installs, no SSH keys, and no port forwarding.

But taiku is more than a screen-sharing tool for terminals. It is a full workspace: you can tile multiple shells side by side, expose local ports as HTTP tunnels, install plugins that add custom panels and toolbar actions, record sessions, and manage devices for remote access. Sessions run across a multi-region mesh, so collaborators connect to the nearest server and traffic routes transparently to wherever the session lives.

Share a session in seconds

The core workflow is deliberately simple. Run taiku, share the link, and your collaborator joins from their browser. The session secret lives in the URL fragment, so it stays client-side rather than being sent in the normal HTTP request.

You can generate separate reader, writer, and admin links when you want more control over access, and sessions automatically reconnect after brief network interruptions.

To get started, follow the installation guide and then walk through the quickstart tutorial. For a deeper look at how sessions, sharing, and access control work, see Share a Session.

Turn one shell into a collaborative workspace

A taiku session is not limited to a single terminal. You can split panes horizontally or vertically, create multiple workspaces, and mix different tile types: shells, tunnel previews, peek panels for monitoring other participants' terminals, and plugin panels that embed custom UIs.

Each participant gets their own workspace layout. You arrange your tiles the way you want without disrupting anyone else's view of the same session. When you need to hand off a shell to a collaborator, the workspace adoption protocol handles ownership transfer cleanly rather than having people fight over the same shell.

This makes taiku well-suited for pair programming, live debugging, team onboarding, and any workflow where multiple people need to see and interact with the same set of terminals. Read more in the collaboration guide and workspace management.

Expose local services with tunnels

When you are developing a web application or API locally, taiku can expose it through an HTTP tunnel so collaborators can access it directly from their browser. Run taiku --tunnel 3000 and your local port 3000 becomes reachable through a taiku URL. The tunnel appears as a tile in your workspace, giving everyone in the session a live preview alongside the terminal.

This is especially useful for frontend development, API testing, and demos where you want collaborators to see both the code and the running application. Learn how to set up and manage tunnels in the tunnels guide.

Work across devices

taiku has a native desktop app built on Tauri that keeps your device registered and reachable. With the desktop app running, you can launch sessions remotely from the dashboard, get native recording support, and maintain persistent device presence.

On mobile, you can join sessions to observe, copy text, and interact with terminals when you are away from your main machine. For headless servers and CI environments, the CLI works without any graphical dependencies.

See the desktop app guide, mobile guide, and device management guide for details on each mode.

Extend taiku with plugins

taiku includes a plugin system that lets you add custom panels, toolbar buttons, hotkeys, and shell aliases to your sessions. Plugins run in sandboxed iframes and communicate with the session through a structured postMessage protocol with fine-grained permissions.

Several built-in plugins ship with taiku: a file browser, an event log, an agent monitor for AI coding assistants, a chat notifier, and a terminal commander. You can also build your own plugins using the plugin SDK.

Start with the plugins overview, explore the built-in plugins, or jump straight to building your own.

Security model

Terminal data is encrypted client-side before transmission. The server can see that a session exists and how much data flows through it, but it cannot directly read terminal contents or typed input.

For a full explanation of the cryptographic design, key derivation, and what the server can and cannot observe, see the security guide.