Desktop app
The native app keeps your machine reachable from anywhere, adds browser tiles, native notifications, and one-prompt recording.
The desktop app is a small native window that does everything the browser does, plus the things only a persistent app can: it keeps your machine online so you can start sessions on it from any other device, opens web pages as tiles next to your terminals, and sends real system notifications.
Install
Download the app from the downloads page. It is available today on macOS and Linux.
- macOS — open the downloaded disk image and drag taiku to your Applications folder.
- Linux — mark the downloaded app file as executable, then launch it from your applications menu or terminal.
On Windows you can use the command-line tool today; the native desktop app is still in progress.
If you have already signed in once, the app picks up your account automatically — there is no separate sign-in step. The first time you open it, the app loads your dashboard, where you can see your active sessions and registered devices and start new ones.
Device presence and launch-from-anywhere
In a browser, taiku is just a tab: when you close it, your machine disappears. The desktop app keeps running quietly in the background, which unlocks the feature that makes it worth installing — starting a session on this machine from anywhere else.
When the app is open, your machine shows up as an online device on your dashboard, visible from any of your other signed-in devices. From that dashboard, pick the machine and press Start session to spin up a terminal on it remotely. You can set the working folder and access settings before it launches.
The new session runs with the exact same files, permissions, and shell environment as if you had started taiku in a terminal on that machine. Local session starts are nearly instant; a session you start remotely takes a few seconds to reach the machine and come up.
A few ways people use this:
- Start a terminal on your office desktop from your laptop at home.
- Kick off a build on a beefier machine and watch it from your phone.
- Open a session on a cloud machine from anywhere.
For registering machines, managing them, and the full remote-access model, see Devices and remote access.
Browser tiles
The app has a built-in browser you can tile right beside your terminals, so docs, dashboards, and web tools live inside your workspace instead of a separate window.
Click any link in your terminal's output and it opens as a browser tile rather than jumping out to an external browser. Each tile has back and forward navigation and find-in-page. Local web previews from your tunnels render here too, with fewer of the cross-origin limitations a regular browser tab runs into.
Native notifications
The desktop app delivers chat messages, session events, and other alerts through your operating system's own notification system. You get real system banners instead of in-page toasts that vanish when you switch windows — so you notice when a teammate messages you or an agent finishes, even when taiku is in the background.
Settings and dictation
The app gives you a native window with a custom titlebar, standard menus (undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, reload, fullscreen, zoom), and the usual keyboard shortcuts. Open Settings to adjust themes and appearance.
The desktop app is also the smoothest place to use voice dictation: press the dictation shortcut to start talking and have taiku type your words into the focused terminal or input. And because it captures its own window directly, recording a session skips the browser's screen-share picker entirely.