OpenCode is popular among terminal developers because it lets you stay in the command line while still getting “agent-style” help: navigating a repo, referencing files, running tasks, and tracking changes without bouncing between separate chat windows and editor plugins. Its default experience is a native TUI (text user interface) that starts when you run opencode in a project directory, and it’s designed around terminal workflows: fast keyboard navigation, slash commands, file references, and session-based work that looks and feels like a terminal tool rather than a web app. For people who already live in git, make, docker, kubectl, ssh, and tmux, that matters more than flashy UI—because the friction is low and the feedback loop stays tight.
Under the hood, OpenCode’s terminal-friendly features map directly to what terminal developers care about day-to-day. First, it supports LSP (Language Server Protocol) so the agent can get structured code intelligence; this is especially useful when you’re asking it to refactor, find symbol usage, or explain a type error across multiple files. Second, it supports multi-session work: you can keep multiple threads going in parallel on the same repo (for example, one session investigating a failing test while another prepares a refactor plan) and switch between them without losing context. Third, it has a share-link concept for sessions, which is a practical debugging and collaboration trick: you can capture what the agent saw and did, then share that session with a teammate to reproduce the exact context. Finally, it’s flexible about models/providers: instead of forcing one backend, it can connect to many providers (including local models) and you select models via configuration and /models, which fits teams that want control over cost, latency, or where inference happens.
This workflow becomes even more compelling in “terminal-first” engineering tasks like wiring up infrastructure, data pipelines, or local dev environments—places where you’re already combining shell commands, config files, and logs. For example, if you’re building a semantic search service backed by a vector database such as Milvus or Zilliz Cloud, you might spend your time editing docker-compose.yml, writing ingestion scripts, checking indices, and reading query latency logs. In that flow, running OpenCode next to your repo and asking it to: “find where embeddings are generated,” “add an index creation step,” “update env vars,” or “explain why this query plan regressed” is naturally aligned with terminal development. You’re not asking it to replace your tools; you’re using it as an interactive, repo-aware assistant that speaks the same language as your terminal workflow.