Prowl — Overview & Highlights

Read this first to understand why Prowl exists and what makes it exciting. An agent can read this file and give a human a confident, accurate first introduction; the human then asks for detail on whatever they like, and the agent dives into the matching file under components/.

Keywords:overviewintroductionpitchhighlightswhat is prowlwhy prowlparallel agentsorchestrator

The one-line version#

Your terminal wasn’t built for agents. Prowl is. It’s a native macOS command center for running many AI coding agents in parallel — each in its own terminal, its own tab/split, and its own git worktree — and keeping all of them in view and under control at once.

The problem it solves#

When you work with coding agents, you stop typing single commands and start orchestrating: Claude Code refactoring in one branch, Codex writing tests in another, a third agent chewing through a migration. A normal terminal — even a tab-heavy one — buries that. You lose track of who’s working, who finished, and who is blocked waiting for your approval. Prowl is built around that exact workflow: many agents, many branches, many ideas, all legible at a glance.

The most exciting parts#

🖼 Canvas — every agent, at a glance#

A bird’s-eye, zoomable board where every card is a live, interactive terminal — not a screenshot. Three agents running and one just finished? You see where instantly, because finished cards light up the moment their task completes. And you can multi-select cards and broadcast a single command to every agent at once — “run the tests”, “commit”, “/clear” — typed once, delivered everywhere. → components/canvas.md

📚 Shelf — your worktrees, lined up like books#

Every worktree becomes a vertical spine stacked on the side, tabs nested underneath, nearby books brighter and distant ones faded so you always know where you are. Flip through the whole stack from the keyboard — ⌘⌃←/⌘⌃→ cycles books, ⌘⌃↑/⌘⌃↓ cycles tabs — so six agents in flight become a one-keystroke triage instead of a hunt. → components/shelf.md

👀 Active Agents panel — your dispatcher for a fleet#

With several agents in flight, the bottleneck isn’t running them — it’s knowing where to look next. The Active Agents panel is a live roster of every agent across every worktree, tab, and split, each row color-coded by status so you can tell at a glance who needs you: Blocked (waiting on your approval), Working, Done (just finished), or Idle. One click jumps straight to that agent’s pane, and ⌃⌥↑/⌃⌥↓ cycle through them from the keyboard — so “which of my ten agents needs me right now?” becomes a glance instead of a hunt. For supervising many agents at once, this is the single most efficient habit in Prowl. → components/active-agents.md · components/agent-detection.md

🤖 The `prowl` CLI — let your agents drive the terminal#

Prowl ships a prowl command-line tool so both you and your agents can inspect and control the app programmatically. An agent can discover sibling panes, run a command in another pane and capture the output, read a screen, or send keystrokes — turning Prowl into a surface that agents coordinate through.

prowl list                         # discover panes & their status
prowl send "npm test" --capture    # run it & capture the output in one shot
prowl read --wait-stable           # read a pane once its screen settles
prowl key enter                    # send keystrokes programmatically

→ components/cli.md

⚡ Custom Actions — one keystroke, any workflow#

Pin swift build, npm test, or claude -p "review this diff" to a button and bind it to a hotkey, per repository. Set it up once and stop retyping the same command every day. Paired with claude -p / codex exec, your terminal becomes a daily AI-powered assistant on a keystroke. → components/custom-actions.md

🔔 Agent Reminders — come back exactly when you’re needed#

Walk away from the screen. The moment an agent finishes — or blocks on a prompt waiting for you — Prowl fires a macOS notification, badges the Dock, and floats that worktree to the top, so a long run never sits unnoticed. Pairs naturally with the Active Agents panel above: get pinged, then jump straight to whoever needs you. → components/notifications.md

And the fundamentals, done right#

Fully native. Powered by libghostty (the Ghostty terminal engine) — no Electron, no web views. Fast, and CJK-safe out of the box.
Git worktrees are first-class. Spin up a parallel branch for a new agent in one click; archive or delete it (and its branch) when you’re done.
Vertical tabs sidebar. Repos, branches, and worktrees down the side; never lose context.
Command Palette (⌘P). Everything is reachable by typing its name.
Diff view (⌘⇧Y). Review exactly what an agent changed against HEAD.
GitHub PRs built in. See CI status; merge, mark-ready, re-run failed jobs, or copy failure logs straight from the palette.
Auto-updates via Sparkle, notarized releases.

How a human typically uses Prowl with this doc set#

This whole manual ships inside the app (Prowl.app/Contents/Resources/docs). The fastest way in is Help → “Ask Agent About Prowl…” (also on the sidebar footer’s Help menu): it copies a ready-to-paste prompt — localized to your system language — that points your coding agent at these bundled docs and asks it to introduce Prowl and suggest features for how you work. From there:

The human asks their agent something about Prowl.
The agent reads this overview.md (for breadth) and/or the specific components/*.md file (for depth), then answers.
The human picks a thread — “tell me more about broadcasting” — and the agent opens components/canvas.md and gets specific.

Continue to concepts.md for the mental model, or jump straight to any component manual.