Liney: A macOS Terminal Workspace That Binds Project Context to Pane Layouts
The explosion of AI coding agents and multi-branch Git workflows has made terminal window management a genuine productivity bottleneck. Liney represents a new category of tool that treats project context as a first-class citizen—something neither plain Terminal, iTerm2, nor tmux fully addresses. For developers juggling multiple repos, worktrees, and persistent AI agents, this approach could save significant cognitive overhead daily.
As AI coding agents and multi-branch Git workflows proliferate, developers often find themselves drowning in terminal windows—one for each project, worktree, service, SSH session, and AI agent. The core problem is that plain terminals have no concept of project context: they don't know that three directories belong to the same Android repository, nor do they remember which panes you had open in a given worktree.
Liney, a native macOS app (v1.0.76, requiring 14.6+), tackles this by making repositories and worktrees the primary organizational unit. Developers add repos to a sidebar, then inside each repo they can open tabs, split panes, run local shells, SSH sessions, or AI agents. Critically, pane layouts persist per repository—return to a worktree and your build/log/agent split is exactly as you left it.
The tool also integrates with AI agent workflows via `liney notify` and `liney status` commands, surfacing agent wait states from terminal scroll output. It supports both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, installable via Homebrew or signed DMG from GitHub Releases.
Liney's core insight is that terminal layout should be a property of the project, not the session—a subtle but powerful shift from tmux's session-based model.
The tool explicitly targets the pain point of 'which project, which branch, which task am I on?'—a cognitive cost that compounds with every additional window.
By integrating AI agent notifications directly into the workspace, Liney acknowledges that agents are becoming permanent residents of the development environment, not transient tools.
The macOS-only limitation (14.6+) means Linux and Windows developers will need alternative solutions, but it also allows deep native integration that cross-platform tools can't match.
Liney's approach suggests a future where terminal emulators evolve from dumb I/O pipes into context-aware development hubs.