How it's built

Vector is a Tauri v2 desktop app. Each tab replaces the shell inside a terminal with an AI coding agent’s CLI (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) — the tab owns a PTY running that agent, rendered into the page with xterm.js. It ships on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Frontend

src/App.tsx is a single, large file holding most UI state: tabs, the per-tab recursive pane tree (PaneLeaf | PaneSplit), the project picker modal, the update banner, and xterm wiring for every pane.

• xterm.js addons in use: FitAddon, WebLinksAddon, Unicode11Addon. WebGL/Canvas renderers were tried and removed — they rendered worse inside the WebView, so the app stays on the DOM renderer.
• The PTY bridge is a thin Tauri invoke layer: start_session spawns the PTY, the frontend subscribes to pty-data-{sessionId} / pty-exit-{sessionId} events, and keystrokes go back over write_stdin.
• src/sidebar/ is the rail + panel (Files / Worktrees / GitHub tabs), src/preview/ holds the preview-pane renderers (code/diff/markdown/mermaid/pdf/image), and src/github/ is the GitHub tab (Repos, PR inbox, Actions, notifications badge) — all talking to github::* backend commands.

Backend

The Rust backend lives in src-tauri/src/:

• main.rs — Tauri command handlers and shared AppState (agent registry, config, profiles, UI config, GitHub state, file watchers). It resolves the agent binary against an augmented PATH before spawning, since macOS GUI apps start with a minimal one.
• pty.rs — PTY spawn/read/write, the VT filter, and frame coalescing (see below). The most load-bearing file in the app.
• config.rs — the builtin agent list, TOML overrides from ~/.config/vector/config.toml, and the ui.toml-backed UiConfig.
• sessions.rs — indexes Claude’s ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl files to power the resume picker.
• sidebar.rs / git.rs — file tree, worktree discovery, and diff generation for the sidebar.
• github/ — the GitHub sidebar backend, entirely driven through the gh CLI via a single choke point (client.rs::run_gh), so auth is whatever the user is already logged into with gh — no tokens stored.

The PTY pipeline

The trickiest part of Vector is keeping the terminal from visually corrupting itself while an agent is mid-redraw. pty.rs splits PTY handling into a reader thread and an emitter thread:

1. Reader thread blocks on reader.read(), runs the output through a VT filter (which carries partial escape sequences across chunk boundaries), and pushes the filtered bytes through an mpsc channel.
2. Emitter thread blocks for the first chunk, then drains the channel with a recv_timeout for 16 ms (one 60fps frame) or until it collects 128 KB, whichever comes first — then emits everything collected as a single combined string.

This coalescing exists because Claude’s diff-redraws emit a cursor-up, a cursor-forward, and a repaint across several separate VT sequences. If those land at xterm.js across multiple separate emit() calls, xterm can render a half-applied state in between — the scattered-letter and em-dash corruption seen in early Vector releases. Batching them into one frame means xterm only ever sees a complete redraw.

The filter also strips Claude’s OSC 777 remote-control notifications (which otherwise bleed into the visible buffer), and — in an aggressive mode enabled only for Claude sessions — strips the DECSET/RST 2026 synchronized-update-mode markers that would otherwise race xterm’s own batching.

Cross-platform layer

OS-divergent operations (credential storage, clipboard/file-manager integration, path handling) live behind src-tauri/src/platform/, a module with one file per OS — macos.rs, linux.rs, windows.rs — plus shared surfaces like creds.rs and uri_list.rs. This is the single dispatch point for anything that differs by platform: the rest of the backend calls into platform::* rather than branching on cfg(target_os) inline, so porting to a new OS means filling in one module rather than hunting through the codebase.

Further reading

Design specs for individual features — the GitHub sidebar, PR inbox, Actions dashboard, notifications, and the cross-platform port — live under docs/superpowers/specs/ in the repository, if you want the reasoning behind a specific piece.