ASTROHACKER

Astrohacker 0.1.29: Terminal Focus, Real Toolbar, Editor Gone

July 17, 2026 · Ryan X. Charles

On July 13 we announced 0.1.17: real browser engines in panes next to your shell on Apple silicon, one Homebrew cask, early-adopter honesty.

A few days later the install line is still one cask, still Apple silicon, still The Agentic Hacker’s Terminal. The workbench is not the same. This post is the field notes from 0.1.17 through 0.1.29—what got better, what we ripped out, and what you should expect when you upgrade.

The short version

  • Browser panes grew a real toolbar — Back, Forward, Refresh that work in the product window, not as science experiments.
  • Shell got less leaky — startup and alt-mode behavior that was eating sessions got fixed and re-qualified on real installs.
  • Install quality stopped being aspirational — legal package, WebKit packaging and quarantine fixes, coherent public releases instead of “hope the archive matches the story.”
  • The editor is gone — no Helix-based Terminal editor, no ahed on PATH, no “editor is included” marketing. Terminal + shell + web engines. Full stop.

If you only remember one sentence: we doubled down on the multi-engine terminal and stopped shipping a second product inside the same install.

Why cut the editor

0.1.17 listed four surfaces in the install story: Terminal, Shell, Editor, Web. That was honest about how the tree was built. It was a bad focus tax.

A Helix fork is a product: runtime, grammars, themes, packaging, health checks, docs, release gates. Maintaining that and three real browser engines and a host terminal is how you spend a month polishing the wrong wedge.

Astrohacker’s bet is the agentic workbench: shell and agents in one window with real browsers (Chromium, WebKit, Ladybird) and real profiles—not “also a modal editor because the monorepo had one.”

So we deleted it. Fork, patches, packaging, cask install, current docs and marketing. Recovery is git history if we ever need the corpse. History posts that mention the editor stay as history. New installs do not get an editor binary.

Not a rename. Not “coming back next week under a cooler name.” Removal. Future editors, if any, get their own product design—not a silent revive of the old PATH name.

Browser panes that behave like a browser

The 0.1.17 post sold engines in panes. Users still needed chrome that respects history.

Since then we shipped and product-qualified:

  • Back — per engine, through the host chrome, not a pretend button.
  • Forward — same contract the other direction.
  • Refresh — including idle icon layout that does not look half-drawn.

Under the glass we also pushed shared native input (text, pointer paths, editing responder work) so panes feel less like three unrelated demos glued into one window.

And a nasty layout bug: split views that swallowed the web surface. If you split a pane and the page vanished into the void, that was real. It is fixed and checked across engines. Your split bindings are supposed to stay yours.

Shell: stop the session tax

Right after 0.1.17 we hit a shell startup / capture problem that could wreck a session before you noticed. That landed as a verified hotfix path (0.1.19 era) and follow-on work: safer startup, configured alt-mode switching that does not lie about which shell you meant.

If your muscle memory is “open Terminal, live in ahsh,” that path is more boring now. Boring is the goal.

Install and release: make “Homebrew” mean something

Early post-0.1.17 life included the unglamorous work:

  • CLI identity — what ships on PATH is the Terminal set (ahterm, ahsh, ahweb, ahapp, engine helpers). No editor. No meta-ah dispatcher.
  • Legal package in the release tree (LICENSE, NOTICE, trademarks, third-party artifacts) so the archive is not a bag of binaries with a shrug.
  • WebKit packaging — staged links, signature expectations, quarantine / xattr cleanup so “installed cask” and “works after first launch” are closer to the same sentence.
  • Release restoration after regressions—engines and public installs repaired through a sequence of public versions (0.1.20–0.1.23), not abandoned.
  • One-command Homebrew release orchestration so the next patch is not a ritual of forgotten steps.
  • Preserve build caches on routine release so WebKit/Chromium/Ladybird do not full-rebuild because someone confused “release mode” with “delete the universe.”
  • First-party crate versions track the cask version on release. Forks stay out of that bump.

Current line at time of writing: 0.1.29 via the usual tap.

brew tap astrohackerlabs/astrohacker
brew trust astrohackerlabs/astrohacker
brew install --cask astrohacker
# or
brew update && brew upgrade --cask astrohacker

Smoke after upgrade:

ahterm +version
ahsh --version
ahweb --version

You should not expect ahed anymore. If an old install left editor config under ~/.config/astrohacker/editor, uninstall zap may still clean it; the product does not reinstall it.

Still true from 0.1.17: ad-hoc codesign, brew trust is tap trust not Apple notarization, first launch can be heavy because engines are real.

Website and slogan (quick)

  • Slogan is The Agentic Hacker’s Terminal again—we briefly tried a shorter form and put the agentic word back where it belongs.
  • Public docs got a craft pass (Terminal-first, less packaging lecture).
  • About page carries the manifesto energy; install cards say Astrohacker Terminal, not “bundle of SKUs.”
  • Brand monogram work landed for assets that need a sharp mark.

Process side, if you care how the sausage ships: we kept running Issues and Experiments hard on this window—navigation, splits, release, editor removal all went through design/result gates. That is how we get agents solving defined work overnight, not a claim that the product is finished.

What still is not shipped

Same honesty bar as 0.1.17:

  • Gecko embedding is research, not a product engine on the cask.
  • Wallet, mobile, web app, English shell product, AI marketplace, Economy flows — direction or later work, not “install and use today.”
  • Notarized / Developer ID shipping is still ahead.

We did a lot of Gecko parity experiment work in this window. That is engineering progress, not a download button.

Who this is for

Unchanged audience: agentic builders on Apple silicon who already live in the terminal and hate Cmd-Tab tax for “open the docs / dashboard / OAuth page.”

If you installed 0.1.17 for browsers in panes, upgrade. The toolbar and install path are less of a science fair.

If you installed 0.1.17 primarily for the included modal editor, this line will disappoint you on purpose. Use the editor you already trust; we are not competing there right now.

What to do

brew update
brew upgrade --cask astrohacker

Read the docs. Open a pane. Hit Back when you mean Back.

If something still vanishes when you split, or an engine fails after upgrade, that is a bug report—not a lifestyle choice. We will keep shipping patches with the same rule we used on the editor: focus the Terminal wedge, prove it, cut the rest.

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