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Terminal

Commander includes a built-in terminal emulator powered by xterm.js and node-pty:
  • Multiple terminal tabs per workspace
  • Runs in the workspace’s worktree directory
  • Full PTY support (colors, cursor positioning, interactive programs)
  • Resizable panels
  • Configurable terminal font and font size

File Browser

Browse files in each workspace’s worktree:
  • Full directory tree view
  • View file contents with syntax highlighting (Shiki)
  • Synced with git status indicators

Diff Viewer

View changes made by agents or manual edits:
  • Staged and unstaged changes per file
  • Inline diff rendering with insertions/deletions counts
  • Per-file diff text access

Agent Tracing

Commander includes a built-in tracing system for debugging agent performance:
  • Trace summaries — View all traces per agent with root span name, status, duration, and counts
  • Span drill-down — Expand a trace to see individual spans with timing, attributes, and events
  • Tool call statistics — Aggregate stats per tool: call count, average duration, and error rate
  • Slowest spans — Identify performance bottlenecks by sorting spans by duration
  • Error spans — Quickly find spans that failed or threw errors
  • Recent traces — View traces across all agents, sorted by recency
Tracing helps answer questions like “Why did this agent take 5 minutes?” or “Which tool calls are failing?”

Usage & Rate Limits

The status bar shows real-time usage information for your Claude accounts:
  • Token usage — Daily input/output token totals and costs
  • Rate limit buckets — Visual utilization bars for each rate limit:
    • Session (5hr rolling window)
    • Weekly aggregate
    • Weekly per-model (Opus, Sonnet)
    • Overage usage
  • Reset times — When each rate limit bucket resets
Click the usage indicator in the status bar to open the full usage stats popover with per-account breakdowns.

Context Fill Indicator

Each agent shows how full its context window is:
  • Visual progress bar showing the percentage of context used
  • By default, only visible when context exceeds 70% capacity
  • Configure Always Show Context Usage in Settings → General to display it at all times
  • Shows exact token count and maximum context size

Command Palette

Press Cmd+K to open the command palette:
  • Fuzzy search powered by Fuse.js
  • Categories: Commands, Workspaces, Agents, Repositories, Settings
  • Prefix search: > commands, @ agents, ! repositories, # settings
  • Recent items boosted in results
Press Cmd+Shift+F for full-text search across all agent conversations:
  • Search all messages globally
  • Optionally filter to a specific agent
  • Results link to conversation context

Notifications

Commander sends native macOS notifications for key events:
TypeTrigger
agent_waitingAgent needs user input
agent_errorAgent encountered an error
agent_rate_limitedAgent hit rate limit
ci_failedCI checks failed on linked PR
pr_commentsNew PR review comments
manager_updateManager has an update
Each type can be individually enabled/disabled. Notifications support snooze and mark-as-read.

Screenshot Capture

Capture and share screenshots directly within Commander:
  • Use a global hotkey to trigger screen capture
  • Select a region, window, or full screen
  • Send captures directly to an agent or the manager via the send overlay
  • Configure a screenshots folder in Settings for automatic detection of new screenshots
  • Preview attachments before sending

Deep Linking

Commander registers the commander:// protocol for deep linking:
  • Open Commander from external sources (Linear, GitHub, browser)
  • Create or switch to workspaces via URL
  • Supported in macOS for seamless integration with other tools

System Tray

Commander shows a menu bar icon with:
  • Running agent count
  • Badge for agents needing attention (errored/waiting)
  • Quick access to show/hide the main window

Auto-Update

Commander checks for updates automatically:
  • Provider: Generic (custom URL)
  • Check interval: Every 4 hours
  • Background download with auto-install on quit
  • Install when idle option to defer updates until no agents are running
  • View update status in Settings → About