CLI Companion

oxt is OxideTerm’s CLI companion — a ~1 MB binary that communicates with the running OxideTerm app via JSON-RPC 2.0 over Unix Socket (macOS/Linux) or Named Pipe (Windows).

What It Does

oxt lets you interact with OxideTerm from any terminal or script — check status, list sessions, and control connections without switching to the OxideTerm window.

# Check OxideTerm status
oxt status

# List active connections
oxt list

# Ping a connection
oxt ping

Output Formats

All commands support both human-readable and JSON output:

# Human-readable (default)
$ oxt status
OxideTerm v0.21.0
Status: Running
Sessions: 3 active

# Machine-readable JSON (for scripts)
$ oxt status --json
{"version":"0.21.0","status":"running","sessions":3}

Available Commands

Command	Description
`status`	Check if OxideTerm is running, get version info and active session count
`list`	List all active SSH sessions with host, user, state, and uptime
`ping`	Test connectivity to a specific connection

Communication Protocol

Transport

Platform	Transport	Path
macOS	Unix Socket	`~/Library/Application Support/com.oxideterm.app/oxideterm.sock`
Linux	Unix Socket	`~/.config/com.oxideterm.app/oxideterm.sock`
Windows	Named Pipe	`\\.\pipe\oxideterm`

Protocol

The protocol is JSON-RPC 2.0 — a lightweight, standardized protocol for remote procedure calls:

// Request
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "status", "id": 1}

// Response
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": {"version": "0.21.0", "status": "running"}, "id": 1}

This makes it easy to integrate with scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring tools. Any language with JSON-RPC support can communicate with OxideTerm.

Installation

oxt is included with OxideTerm — no separate installation required. The binary is available in the application bundle:

Platform	Location
macOS	`/Applications/OxideTerm.app/Contents/MacOS/oxt`
Linux	Depends on installation method; typically alongside the main binary
Windows	Same directory as `OxideTerm.exe`

You can add the binary location to your PATH for convenient access from any terminal.

Use Cases

Scripting

#!/bin/bash
# Check if OxideTerm is running before attempting operations
if oxt status --json | jq -e '.status == "running"' > /dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "OxideTerm is running"
  oxt list --json | jq '.sessions[] | .host'
fi

Monitoring

# Watch active sessions (refresh every 5s)
watch -n 5 oxt list