I don't lose terminals when they're running. I lose them when I come back.
An hour ago I had five agents working on different things. Now I'm staring at a sidebar of names, trying to remember which one was refactoring the middleware and which one was writing tests. The agent that needs my approval is somewhere in there. So is the one I forgot about entirely.
PonyMux 0.9.0 is mostly about that moment. The moment you return. It adds ⌘K search to find the right Terminal by keyword, wake summaries that show what a sleeping Terminal was doing before you resume it, and cross-provider handoff to continue a conversation from Claude Code in Codex or vice versa.
What does search actually find?
Press ⌘K and the sidebar switches to a search view. Type a word — or several — and PonyMux filters your Terminals by name, prompt, recap, and the agent's last reply. Every word has to match somewhere across those fields.
The scoping is deliberate. Three pills at the top — All, Terminals, Archive — let you narrow where you're looking. Trashed Terminals don't appear. And only the latest session per Terminal is searched, not the full history.
That last part is a conscious tradeoff. Searching every historical session would return more results, but most of them would be stale. When I'm trying to find something, I almost always mean "the thing that's happening now," not "something an agent said three days ago." If I need the history, the Sessions panel is still there.
Results are ranked by where the match lands — title first, then prompt, then recap — and boosted by recency.
The result rows show matched text in context: title with highlights, a snippet from the matched field, the provider, the list path, and how long ago the session was active. Enough to recognize the right one without opening it first.
Press Escape and you're back where you were. No state changed.
What was that terminal doing again?
Before 0.9.0, waking a sleeping Terminal was a small leap of faith. You'd see the last captured screen — a frozen frame of wherever the agent left off — and either resume immediately or type to start fresh.
Now the empty area shows a short summary before you commit: the agent name, what it was working on, and when it was last active. If the transcript is still on disk, PonyMux can tell you what will resume before you press anything.
If the transcript is gone — deleted, compressed, or moved — the Terminal says so and offers Shell Only instead of pretending everything is fine.
The point isn't automation. It's not having to wake something up just to find out what it was.
A related change: agents that were running when you quit PonyMux now appear in the Agents sidebar after restart. Previously, quitting cleared the Agents list and you had to scroll through All Terminals to find them. Now they're where you left them.
Can I continue this in a different agent?
Sometimes the right move is to switch providers. You started a task in Claude Code, realized it needs a different model, and want to pick it up in Codex. Or the other way around.
Handoff does that. From the Sessions panel or the Inspector, select Handoff and PonyMux extracts the recent conversation — up to five turns, tool summaries, and a recap if one exists — into a Markdown file, then launches the target CLI with that file as context.
The source session is untouched. You can still Resume it in its original provider. Handoff creates a new session, not a migration.
It's intentionally lightweight. The handoff file is readable Markdown, not a binary blob or an API call. The target agent gets enough context to pick up the thread. It doesn't get the full transcript — that stays with the source provider — but it gets the shape of the conversation.
What else shipped
A few smaller things in 0.9.0 that don't need their own section:
- Quieter updates. Sparkle no longer interrupts with a modal dialog. A sidebar button appears when a new version is ready.
- Help menu. Documentation links, a feedback entry point, and a What's New item that links to the changelog.
The theme
These features don't share a category. Search is navigation, wake summary is lifecycle, handoff is session management. But they share a user moment: you were away, and now you need to find your place again.
That moment gets more frequent as agents get better. The better they are at working independently, the more time you spend away from them, and the harder it is to come back. The terminal that helps you return — not just the terminal that helps you start — is the one that scales with more agents.
For details on search, see the Search section in the docs. For session operations, see Sessions.
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