Terminal Insights
Terminal Insights shows AI-generated summaries of your terminal activity and records command history for navigation. Apple Intelligence generates the summaries on your device. The overlay uses Liquid Glass on macOS 26+ and falls back to ultraThinMaterial on earlier versions.
Requirements
- macOS 26 or later
- Apple Intelligence enabled on your Mac
When Apple Intelligence is unavailable or a summary takes longer than 2 seconds, the pill falls back to showing the last command executed.
Viewing a summary
- Hover over a terminal tile.
- A pill appears with a short AI-generated summary of recent activity.
The collapsed pill auto-dismisses after 4 seconds or when you move the mouse away.
Expanding the timeline
Click the pill to expand a timeline of recent commands, with the newest command first. Click it again to collapse the view. CrispyVibe preserves the headline for the next hover.
The expanded panel auto-collapses 0.4 seconds after your mouse leaves. Moving the mouse back into the panel cancels the collapse.
Summary/Original toggle
The expanded timeline includes a Summary/Original toggle. Use it to switch each entry between its AI-generated summary and raw command text. The timeline shows only one mode at a time.
The Copy button copies the text visible in the selected mode. It highlights on hover and shows a checkmark after copying.
Phase indicators
The summary includes a phase indicator that classifies the current terminal activity:
| Phase | Color | Icon |
|---|---|---|
| Idle | Gray | — |
| Building | Orange | 🔨 |
| Testing | Green | ✓ |
| Debugging | Red | 🐜 |
| Deploying | Orange | ↑ |
| Reviewing | Blue | 👁 |
| Editing | Purple | ✏️ |
| Searching | Blue | 🔍 |
TUI suppression
CrispyVibe automatically hides the overlay while a full-screen terminal application such as vim or htop is running.
Security
Before recording input, Terminal Insights checks whether the text you typed is visible on screen. At a hidden prompt (for example, sudo, ssh, read -s, or a GPG passphrase), the terminal disables echo, so the typed text does not appear in the render buffer. Terminal Insights excludes that input from command history, the context summary, and Scroll Assist D-pad navigation.
Settings
Terminal Insights uses your existing terminal insight preferences rather than a dedicated settings section.
Known limitations
- Apple Intelligence is the only available summarization engine.
- Summaries cover terminal commands only, not agent context.
- CrispyVibe does not persist summary history between sessions.
- Summaries are available in English only.
- Summary context grows over the lifetime of a session.