Ghostty's author proposes OSC 7501, letting programs tell the terminal what they're doing.

动察 Beating AI News Flash: Mitchell Hashimoto, author of Ghostty and co-founder of HashiCorp, has proposed a new terminal protocol called OSC 7501.

When programs like Claude Code, Codex, and Terraform are running, external tools often cannot tell whether they are working, waiting for user input, or already finished, and can only guess.

Currently, tools like Herdr read the terminal screen, window title, and process, then use rules to determine the Agent's state. Mitchell gave an example, saying that Herdr maintains 16 rules just to recognize Claude Code, and these rules have changed about 10 times in the past 3 months. If Claude Code changes a loading animation, it may require re-adaptation. He also said he found more than 250 Agent orchestration tools, many of which are repeatedly solving similar problems.

The approach of OSC 7501 is to let programs report themselves. A program can tell the terminal whether it is idle, working, waiting for the user, finished, or has encountered an error, and can also attach progress and the reason it is waiting for someone. For example, when Claude Code is stuck on a permission confirmation, it can directly tell the terminal "I am waiting for authorization," instead of making Herdr infer it from text and symbols on the screen.

These states are transmitted directly through the terminal connection the program is already using, so they also work over SSH and inside containers. Existing terminal progress protocols can only express busy, progress, or error, and cannot clearly say what the program is actually waiting for. OSC 7501 fills exactly this gap.

Mitchell has already implemented this protocol in libghostty and Rex, and has also created proof of concept integrations for Terraform, Claude Code, Codex, and Homebrew through plugins or forks. Integration is not complicated, with each implementation taking no more than a dozen lines of code. However, whether OSC 7501 can truly become widespread still depends on whether other terminals and programs are willing to adopt it.