Supported AI CLIs

git-paw auto-detects these AI coding CLIs on your PATH:

“Cold resume” means git-paw can restore the CLI’s prior conversation when recovering a stopped session or relaunching a dead pane, rather than starting it fresh — see Per-CLI cold resume. A “No” here reflects the CLI having no known session-assignment/resume flags, not a defect in it; add session_id_args / resume_args to a [clis.<name>] override (see Custom CLIs) to enable resume for a CLI that supports it but isn’t in git-paw’s built-in table yet.

The Cursor row names cursor-agent, Cursor’s agent CLI. The bare cursor binary is the Cursor editor launcher on most installations, so git-paw no longer auto-detects it as an AI CLI. This affects auto-detection only — if cursor is the command you want a pane to launch, any of these still resolves it unchanged:

• git paw start --cli cursor,
• a [clis.cursor] entry (see Custom CLIs),
• a saved session whose recorded cli is cursor.

Spec-driven selection and git paw add validate availability against the detected list, so there a [clis.cursor] entry is the route to take. default_cli is not an escape hatch: it only pre-selects a row in the interactive picker, and the picker is built from the detected list — an undetected cursor has no row to pre-select, so the setting has no effect.

Headless (one-shot) form

The --unattended drive loop can hand a judgment call to the orchestrator CLI as a single non-interactive turn that reads its prompt from stdin — see Headless hand-off of judgment calls. git-paw knows the headless form of two CLIs:

Any CLI that can run one turn from stdin gains the hand-off through a headless_args override in its [clis.<name>] entry; the override also wins over a built-in row. Without a form, the drive loop keeps every judgment call on the broker and says so at launch.

Per-CLI Setup Support

git paw setup-cli writes git-paw’s setup items into a CLI’s own settings. An item is available only when git-paw’s compiled fact table declares it for that CLI and those facts have been verified against an installed copy of it.

Nothing is withheld here as a judgement about those CLIs — their settings formats simply have not been checked yet. The per-CLI audit that adds them is planned for v0.23.0. Until then setup-cli reports the item as not supported and writes nothing, which is the honest answer rather than a guess at a file format.

A Claude Code variant registered under another name (a wrapper binary in a [clis.<name>] entry) has no row of its own, but is still covered by git paw setup-cli claude: the target settings file belongs to the repository, not to the binary.

git paw doctor reports the current status for your installation.

How Detection Works

git-paw scans your PATH for each known binary name. If found, it records the full path and makes the CLI available for selection.

Detection runs every time you start a session, so newly installed CLIs are picked up automatically.

Adding Custom CLIs

Any AI CLI not in the list above can be registered as a custom CLI:

# Register by path
git paw add-cli my-agent /usr/local/bin/my-agent

# Register by binary name (resolved via PATH)
git paw add-cli my-agent my-agent --display-name "My Agent"

Custom CLIs appear alongside detected ones in the selection prompt. See Configuration for more details.

Deduplication

If a custom CLI has the same binary name as a detected one, the custom definition takes precedence. This lets you override the path or display name of a detected CLI.

Missing CLIs

If a custom CLI’s command cannot be found (the binary doesn’t exist at the specified path and isn’t on PATH), it is excluded from the selection list with a warning. This prevents launching sessions that would immediately fail.

Prompt-shape detection

The list above is git-paw’s binary detection — it says which CLIs it can launch. Separately, the supervisor’s prompt detectors recognise a launched CLI’s terminal surface (its ready banner, permission-prompt wording, and so on) via a prompt-shape profile. git-paw ships only the Claude Code profile, embedded in the binary; no other CLI in the table above has a shipped profile, because a guessed one would misdetect confidently rather than falling back visibly. Every CLI — listed or custom — resolves the embedded Claude default for any field it has no profile override for. See CLI Prompt-Shape Profiles for the field reference and how to author one.