Use case · the core wedge
Three, five, eight terminal windows open — same app, same icon, same title — and you have to click into each one and squint at the scrollback to remember what it's doing. This page is about exactly that problem, and terminal --tags does exactly this one thing. No overpromising here: this is the page where the query and the product line up perfectly.
The honest baseline first
If you only use one terminal app and you're disciplined, you already have weaker free options. tmux pane titles label panes inside one window. iTerm2 and Windows Terminal can rename a tab or set a per-profile color. Shell prompt frameworks (Starship, oh-my-zsh) can color the prompt by directory. Those work — but they're per-app, they live inside the window, and they vanish the moment you Cmd+Tab away or open Mission Control.
None of them help when you have five identical windows and need to find the right one without clicking in. That last case is the only one terminal --tags is built for, and it's built for it well.
The label rides on top of the window — it survives Cmd+Tab, Mission Control, and Spaces.
To pick the right window without clicking into it, the label has to:
live on top of the window (an OS-level overlay), not inside the scrollback;
survive Cmd+Tab, Mission Control, and Spaces (Alt+Tab and virtual desktops on Windows);
work on identical windows from the same app;
be fast to set — a hotkey and a click, not editing a config file.
terminal --tags is exactly those four properties and nothing more.
Install terminal --tags.
It runs from the menu bar (Mac) or system tray (Windows). No account, no sign-in, to tag a window — tagging is free forever.Press the global hotkey
to enter tagging mode.Click the window
you want to label.Type a name and pick a color
— “prod-db”, “log tail”, “build”, “agent: tests”. The label appears as an overlay attached to that window.Repeat
for each window. There is no limit on how many windows you tag.Switch freely.
Cmd+Tab now shows distinct colored, named windows. Mission Control and the Dock show the same. The label follows the window across Spaces.Optional: open Settings to customize the palette (background + text colors), the tag shape (pill / rounded / square), the font, and a Big-tags toggle for readability across a room or on a shared screen. All free.
terminal --tags does not detect what's running in a window — it shows the label you set, not a live status. It doesn't manage sessions, doesn't multiplex, doesn't sync (yet). It's a small visual layer on top of the terminal you already use. That narrowness is the point: it's the cleanest possible fix for “which window is which,” and nothing else.
Free, no account needed to tag a window. Pro adds a one-click tagged launcher when you're ready for it.
Get terminal --tagsMac · Windows · one license, both desktops
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