Smart Terminal MCP server

smart-terminal-mcp

A PTY-based MCP server with strong Windows support, giving MCP-capable AI clients and their agents persistent, interactive shell access via pseudo-terminals (node-pty).

Unlike simple exec-based approaches, this keeps PTY-backed shell sessions alive across steps, with bidirectional communication for interactive CLI tools, incremental reads, and session state that carries forward.

See the Changelog for recent updates.

Why use this instead of your AI client's built-in terminal?

Install this if you want a more consistent terminal workflow across AI clients, instead of relying on whatever built-in terminal behavior a single client happens to provide.

This MCP is most useful when you want:

• Portable workflow across clients -- The same terminal tools and habits work across Claude Code, Cursor, Trae, Antigravity, and other MCP-capable clients.
• Reusable prompts and tooling -- Workflows built around tools like terminalwait, terminalretry, terminalrunpaged, and terminalgethistory are easier to reuse across teams and clients, with less lock-in to one client's terminal behavior.
• Persistent terminal state -- Keep the same shell session alive across steps, including the current folder, environment, and running processes.
• Better interactive behavior -- Safely handle tools that expect TTY behavior—such as vim, npm prompts, or interactive installers that often hang on standard piped stdin. Support full interactive sessions with REPLs, Ctrl+C, arrow keys, and dynamic prompts.
• More control over large output -- Truncate, page, diff, retry, wait for patterns, or fetch history instead of dumping everything at once.
• More predictable automation -- Use deterministic completion markers instead of guessing when a command is done.

If your AI client already provides a stable, stateful, interactive terminal with good output handling, you may not need this MCP for basic command execution. The main reason to add it is to make terminal-driven workflows more explicit, reusable, and portable across clients.

Features

Think of this as a controlled keyboard + terminal for an agent running inside an MCP client. It opens a persistent PTY-backed shell session so the agent can send commands and keystrokes, read output, and continue working in the same session.

Core terminal features

• Interactive terminal sessions -- Keeps a persistent PTY-backed shell session open so the agent can send input, read output, and pick up where it left off.
• Deterministic command completion -- terminal_exec uses unique markers so it can tell when a command has finished.
• Clean output -- Pre-command markers help keep returned output readable, even when shells echo commands or expand aliases.
• Working directory tracking -- terminal_exec reports the current folder after each command.

Long output and long-running commands

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.