Menú de documentación

Documentación

What is TDE

The terminal desktop, My Loop and the parts that make up TDE.

En esta página

Overview

TDE is a text desktop environment: a full desktop — windows, workspaces, a taskbar, an app launcher, an app store — rendered entirely in ANSI character cells and driven by the mouse. It is written 100% in Rust and ships as a single binary. There is no X server, no Wayland compositor and no GPU in the picture: the thing that draws your desktop is whatever terminal you already have open.

That one design decision is what makes the rest possible. Because the desktop is a stream of cells and SGR mouse events, it travels over an SSH connection as cheaply as htop does. You run the binary on a VPS, your laptop's terminal paints the pixels, and your mouse works.

TDE and My Loop

Two names show up across the product, and they mean different things.

NameWhat it refers to
TDEThe desktop and the platform: the window manager, the native apps, the Store, the CLI, themes.
My LoopThe task and agent product that runs on TDE: projects, tasks, pipelines, stages, human gates, bots.

You install TDE. You work in My Loop. The installer and the release notes sometimes write it as "My Loop (TDE)" because they are the same download.

What is in the desktop

  • A window manager. Drag a title bar to move a window, drag the bottom-right corner to resize, click to focus, type into the focused window. Floating and tiling both work, plus workspaces, an overview and a drag-to-tile overlay. See Windows and workspaces.
  • Desktop chrome. A taskbar, a status bar, a centered quick-launch Notch, a Launcher with a command palette, and a Control Center for system state and settings. See Notch, taskbar and launcher.
  • Around two dozen native apps, compiled into the binary — Files, Code, Shell, Browser, Docs, Sheets, Database, Redis, API, Git, Pull Requests, Diff, Disk, Process, Env, Container, Hosts, PDF, Mermaid, Email, AI Chat, Brain, Sandboxes, Webhook, Vercel and more. See the apps overview.
  • A Store. Third-party TUIs and CLIs install from a built-in catalog into a TDE-managed directory. See the Store.
  • An agent platform. Agents, personas, squads, pipelines, human gates and bots, with a headless runtime that keeps working while the desktop is closed. See My Loop.

Native apps are part of the binary. Everything else — third-party TUIs, agent CLIs, toolchains — is installed on demand, starting with the first-boot wizard.

Three ways to run it

All three run the same binary on Linux. Only the host that draws the cells and delivers the mouse changes.

Over SSH to a VPS — the primary target

A server has no desktop and needs none. You SSH in, run tde, and your local terminal draws the desktop while forwarding mouse packets back over the SSH stream. The Linux build is a fully static musl binary — no glibc, no OpenSSL, bundled SQLite — so it runs on Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu and stock VPS images alike.

This is the shape TDE is designed around: a persistent machine that holds your projects, your agents and your running work, reachable from whatever terminal you happen to be sitting at.

As a desktop app

On a machine that already has a graphical desktop, TDE runs as a normal window inside it. The installer can register a TDE entry in your applications menu that launches the desktop inside kitty, whose graphics protocol gives the built-in browser and image viewers real-pixel rendering. See Terminal graphics.

As a kiosk login session

On Linux, TDE can register itself as a selectable session in your display manager. Logging into it starts the cage Wayland kiosk compositor running a fullscreen terminal with tde inside — a text desktop in place of GNOME, in a few megabytes of RSS rather than a couple of gigabytes.

macOS is terminal-only: the TDE.app bundle opens Terminal.app and runs the embedded binary. There is no kiosk session there, and the first-boot wizard hides that option.

What it needs

A real terminal with mouse support and, ideally, truecolor. Every common emulator qualifies — kitty, foot, Alacritty, WezTerm, GNOME Terminal, Ghostty, Terminal.app. The one place mouse does not work today is a bare Linux virtual console, which emits no SGR mouse events; that is exactly why the kiosk session bundles a terminal instead of drawing on the raw TTY.

Quitting is Ctrl-Q, everywhere.

Where to go next