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tty7 puts an editor at the shell prompt. Nothing to install, no plugin to source — the moment a supported shell starts in a pane, the prompt behaves like this.
The tty7 prompt

Placeholder — video: typing a command with a ghost suggestion, accepting it, then opening the completion menu

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Ghost suggestions

As you type, the rest of the line is filled in from your history, greyed out ahead of the cursor. Your existing shell history is what feeds it — there is no separate database to build up first, and it carries across sessions and reboots.

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Tab completion, with descriptions

⇥ opens a completion menu that knows what it is offering:
  • Commands from your PATH and your shell’s builtins
  • Files and directories, with cd, pushd, popd, and rmdir offering directories only
  • Flags and subcommands with their descriptions, for about 100 common commands — git, cargo, docker, kubectl, npm, brew and the rest
  • Values where a flag only takes certain ones
Explained tab completion

Placeholder — screenshot: the completion menu on git c, each subcommand with its description

When tty7 has nothing useful to offer, the ⇥ falls through to your shell’s own completion, so a carefully configured zsh setup is not lost. To hand ⇥ back to the shell entirely, turn off Settings → Input → Prompt → Tab completion (tab_completion in config.json).

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Syntax highlighting

The line you are typing is coloured as you type it: the command, its flags, its arguments, paths, quoted strings, operators, comments. It is a fast tokenizer, not a shell parser — it never changes what gets run.

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Line editing

The prompt behaves like a text field, because it is one:
  • Click to place the caret anywhere in the line
  • Select with the mouse, drag to extend
  • Word motion and word delete
  • Undo
Everything readline does still works — this sits on top, it does not replace it.
On macOS, turn on Settings → Input → Keyboard → Option (⌥) acts as Meta if you want ⌥ B / ⌥ F to move by word instead of typing ∫ and ƒ.

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Typing with an IME

Pinyin, Kana, Hangul and the rest work in a pane the way they do in a text field: the composition is drawn in place at the cursor and only the committed text reaches the program. Two rules decide who gets a keystroke:
  • A plain printable key goes to the IME. A key held with ⌃, ⌘, fn, or ⌥ does not — those are chords, not characters.
  • A program that asks for every key gets every key. When something turns on the kitty keyboard protocol’s report-all-keys mode, the IME steps aside so the program sees raw input.
On macOS with Option (⌥) acts as Meta turned on, ⌥ chords bypass the IME entirely, so ⌥ B reaches your shell as meta-b instead of being eaten as a dead key.
Rendering CJK well is a separate question — see fonts and the two-column grid.

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Multi-line commands

A command that wraps, or one you deliberately break across lines, edits in place. The grid shifts to keep the caret visible instead of scrolling the whole screen away. The newline key is rebindable as InsertNewline under Settings → Keybindings.

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Which shells

The prompt features arrive through tty7’s shell integration, which is injected automatically — nothing to add to your rc file — for zsh, bash, fish, PowerShell, and WSL. Other shells (nushell, elvish, xonsh, and the rest) run perfectly well in a pane; they simply do not get the prompt layer. The integration is also what reports the working directory, the exit code of each command, and where prompts begin — which is what the sidebar’s branch readout, the “command finished” notification, and tty7 procs are built on. How shell integration works →

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Turning it off

Each prompt feature is a switch, and turning one off hands its key straight back to the shell:

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Giving the whole prompt back to the shell

Turning off Settings → Input → Prompt → Prompt editor (prompt_editor: false) hands over not one key but the line itself. Every keystroke at the prompt — printable characters, arrows, IME commits, paste — goes straight to the PTY, and your shell’s own line editor does the editing: zsh’s ZLE, bash’s readline, fish’s reader. A widget you bound yourself runs exactly as it does outside tty7:
What you give up is the layer this page describes: ghost suggestions, the completion menu, the fuzzy ⌃ R, the multi-line editor, mouse caret placement and undo on the prompt. Tab completion and history search grey out in Settings while it is off — both are menus tty7 opens inside that editor, so there is nothing left for them to switch. What you keep is everything shell integration reports: prompt boundaries, the working directory, exit codes, “command finished” notifications, the sidebar’s branch readout, tty7 procs. The setting moves the line editor, not the integration. It applies to open panes immediately, so there is nothing to restart, and a line you had half-typed is handed to the shell rather than dropped.
Reach for this if the shell’s own history traversal matters to you — shared history between panes, HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS, a prefix search bound to ↑ — or if a plugin you rely on (zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting, atuin) should own the line instead.