Your desktop,
made of particles.
The live wallpaper, the agent console at the edge of your screen, gesture control and the eight Pro styles.
Your agents, written on
your own desktop.
Terse replaces your wallpaper with a particle field that reads your real desktop picture and keeps it. Every tool call your agents make, every token they spend, condenses out of that field as text, holds, and dissolves back. Nothing loops — the motion is the data.
The background of this page is the same engine, running now. Click anywhere to change the wallpaper under it.
One slot is reserved for the agent log so the numbers can never crowd it out; three more carry tokens, cache rate, burn and cost. They arrive staggered, never in unison.
A token delta pushes a ripple out from where the text landed. A large one throws a meteor. When your agents go quiet the field settles — it never fakes activity.
The particles take their colour from the desktop picture you already chose, so the wallpaper still looks like yours — dissolved into light rather than replaced.
cinematic · aurora · starfall · ink · neon · vortex · bloom · zen. Each changes the palette, the choreography, and how the text gathers and breaks apart.
Every running agent,
one touch from the edge of your screen.
The console is a line on the left edge of your screen that opens into every agent you have running — drawn, like the wallpaper, entirely in particles. The panel and the hand in this page's background are a replay of it.
Touch the edge and a rail of status beads bursts into cards — amber is waiting for you, green is working, blue is thinking, white just finished. Claude Code sessions, with Codex listed alongside.
A card that needs approval shows the edit first: removed lines break apart in red, new ones gather in green. Allow or deny right on the card, and the command is pulled into the session's status dot.
A 5-hour fuel bar fed by particles from each busy session, a context watermark that collapses when a conversation is compacted, and on every card its branch, the +/− on the files it touched, and its PR.
"Away 23 min: 6 files changed, 14 commands run." New answers stay marked unread, and a session that keeps failing or repeating the same call is flagged.
Your Mac's camera and Apple Vision track 21 joints of your hand, on-device. An open palm pushes the particles, a twisted fist changes their speed, a held palm freezes them — and Allow only ever answers a pinch.
Stop wasting
tokens and money.
Optimize every prompt. Monitor every agent session. And give your whole team visibility with Terse Cloud — analytics by developer, project, and tool.
First Launch — macOS Security Step (one-time only)
macOS blocks unsigned apps by default. Pick whichever method works for you:
A System Settings — easiest, no Terminal needed
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security
3. Scroll to the Security section — click "Open Anyway" next to Terse
4. Confirm in the popup — done. Terse opens normally from now on.
B Right-click to open — works on macOS Ventura and earlier
2. Choose Open from the menu
3. Click Open in the dialog that appears
Note: macOS Sequoia (15+) removed this option — use Method A instead.
C Terminal command — one command, works on all versions
xattr -cr /Applications/Terse.app && /Applications/Terse.app/Contents/MacOS/terse 2>/dev/null &