Terminal Insights
Terminal Insights shows AI-generated summaries of your terminal activity and records command history for navigation. Summaries are powered by Apple Intelligence and run entirely on-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 it into a timeline of recent commands, listed newest first. Click the pill again to collapse the view. The headline is preserved for the next hover.
The expanded panel auto-collapses after 0.4 seconds when 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 between AI-generated summaries and raw command text for each entry. Only one mode is visible at a time.
The Copy button copies whichever text is currently visible based on the toggle state. The button shows a hover highlight and displays a checkmark after copying.
Phase indicators
The summary displays a phase indicator reflecting what the terminal is doing:
| Phase | Color | Icon |
|---|---|---|
| Idle | Gray | — |
| Building | Orange | 🔨 |
| Testing | Green | ✓ |
| Debugging | Red | 🐜 |
| Deploying | Orange | ↑ |
| Reviewing | Blue | 👁 |
| Editing | Purple | ✏️ |
| Searching | Blue | 🔍 |
TUI suppression
The overlay hides automatically when a full-screen terminal application is running (for example, vim or htop).
Security
Terminal Insights validates screen visibility before recording any input. When you type at a hidden prompt (e.g., sudo, ssh, read -s, GPG passphrase), the terminal disables echo — the typed text never appears in the render buffer. Because the input is invisible on screen, it is never captured in command history, surfaced in the context summary, or exposed through Scroll Assist D-pad navigation.
Settings
There are no dedicated settings for Terminal Insights. It inherits your terminal insight preferences.
Known limitations
- Apple Intelligence is required — no alternative summarization engine is available.
- Summaries cover terminal commands only, not agent context.
- Summary history is not persisted between sessions.
- English-only.
- Summary context grows over the lifetime of a session.