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github-actions[bot] edited this page Oct 28, 2026 · 6 revisions

Where it runs

If your terminal carries the Kitty keyboard protocol (Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2), bothy runs in it. If it does not, bothy opens a Ghostty window instead, so that Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Enter reach an agent rather than arriving as plain Enter. --in-place and --window overrule that decision in either direction. To make an override permanent, set bothy config set workspace.launch here, or window for the opposite; the flags still win for a single run. With no graphical display — over SSH, for example — it runs where it is.

That is bothy noticing you are somewhere else. bothy connect is the other direction: you stay here and the workspace opens against another machine's files, with nothing installed on it. See Connecting.

No terminal gets inline image previews, on any platform: Yazi picks its protocol from what the terminal says it is, Zellij answers that in its own name, and what Yazi then sends is not what Zellij renders. The file pane says (press Enter to preview) and Enter opens the file in your system's own viewer. The doctor names the cause rather than leaving you to adjust the wrong setting.

Inside a Toolbx or Distrobox container, bothy remembers which container it put its tools in and goes back there when you launch it from the host. If you install from a container that has none of the tools, bothy downloads them all into its own directory, and the result works from either side.

Which machines: Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian and Arch in containers, and macOS on a Mac, on every release — installed, exercised, uninstalled, with the whole doctor report compared against an expected one. That is what supported means here: not that it should work, but that a run proved it did.

Windows is in beta. There is a bothy_windows_amd64.zip on every release and scoop install bothy brings it down. bothy installs there, fetches all eight tools and verifies them, generates every config, keeps its own config out of %APPDATA%, opens the workspace, and the session survives closing the window and comes back with its panes where you left them. All of that was done on a Windows 11 machine rather than reasoned about.

It is beta and not supported because supported here means the machines named in the paragraph above, which CI installs and checks on every release. There is a Windows job now, and it has not been green for long enough to mean anything yet. Three things are known rather than guessed:

  • No arm64. Zellij publishes no Windows build for it, and a workspace with no multiplexer is not a workspace.
  • Two things must be installed first. The Microsoft C runtime, or Yazi exits the moment it starts with nothing on screen to say why; and Git for Windows, whose file.exe is how Yazi works out what a file is. The doctor names both and what to run.
  • confine, box and connect are Linux and macOS features — they want podman, toolbox, flatpak-spawn and FUSE. They report themselves unavailable rather than failing oddly.

Use WezTerm, which is what the Windows work was done against. bothy doctor is the authoritative answer on that machine, as it is on any machine CI does not cover.

Two things bothy gives advice for and does not test. Silverblue and other image-based systems, where dnf means rpm-ostree and a reboot: bothy is written on one and cannot put one in a container. Mint, Pop!_OS and the other derivatives, which inherit Debian's advice through ID_LIKE — their container images report ID=ubuntu, so a job using one would prove nothing the Ubuntu job does not. That path is unit-tested instead.

macOS was listed as supported for eight releases on the strength of the binaries being built, which is not the same thing. The first Mac to run it found a file opener naming a program macOS does not have; the first machine in CI found an uninstall that reported success and left the binary behind. Both are fixed, and neither would have been found by reading the code.

Anywhere else, bothy runs and the doctor reports what it cannot do on that machine. Those platforms are unverified, and bothy says so rather than implying otherwise.

Why a platform counts as supported only when CI installs it: ADR-012.

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