NST-MSG(1)

💌 NST-MSG(1) — ok so this is nst-msg, bestie

Hi hi hi 🌸 so this is the manual page for nst-msg, and yes this is the NST-MSG(1) page you're looking at, welcome, come in, sit down, we're gonna learn a thing.

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✨ NAME ✨

nst-msg — literally just sends a message to the nst terminal emulator 🫶

💖 SYNOPSIS 💖

nst-msg [-S] [-s] [-d] [-D] [-t] [--cwds]

That's it, that's the whole vibe check 👑

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so nst-msg is a tool that lets you interact with running nst(1) terminal emulator instances. Very demure, very mind-your-own-business, very talking to your terminal.

Here's the important part, so like, pay attention: most commands target the currently running terminal, and that terminal gets identified by the NST_IPC_ADDR environment variable — which nst sets automatically for you, no cap, you don't have to do a single thing 💅

But some commands are global — those ones target all terminal instances that are accessible by the calling user. Main character energy, honestly.

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -S, --snapshot — saves a snapshot of the current terminal history. You can grab that snapshot back later with -s. It's giving screenshot but for your scrollback 📸
• -s, --get-snapshot — prints the data that got stored during the last snapshot operation (-S) to stdout. And if there's no snapshot available? Then nothing gets printed. Empty. Void. Silence. 💀
• -d, --get-history — prints (dumps) the current terminal history buffer to stdout. All the receipts, right there 🌈
• -D, --get-global-history — same as -d bestie, but it prints the concatenated history of all accessible nst instances to stdout. Use this when you're searching for data that got lost in one of your many, many terminal instances 😭 iconic for a reason
• -t, --test — does a connection test to the associated nst terminal emulator instance. Connection succeeds → exit status of zero. Succeeds it does not → non-zero, soz 🙈 You can use this to figure out whether an nst terminal is associated at all. Very "are you there? it's me" of it.
• --cwds — this one retrieves the current working directories of the child processes of all reachable nst instances. One CWD gets printed per line, and only the unique entries are printed — no duplicates allowed, we're not doing that here 💅

Heads up though: this does not currently support the exotic case where the CWD may contain a newline character. Like, that's a whole thing, and we're not handling it. Just so you know 🧚

• --version — prints the nst-msg version number and then it exits. Byeee ✌️
• -h, --help — prints a usage text. The classic. The icon. The legend 🌟

👑 AUTHORS 👑

See the LICENSE file for the authors. They're in there, go look 🫶

💜 LICENSE 💜

See the LICENSE file for the terms of redistribution. Go read it, fr fr, it's important and also it's right there 📖

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okay that's the whole page!! mwah 💋 and for the record this little beauty is dated 09/10/2025 — yes, that's the date on the NST-MSG(1) footer, I would never leave you hanging like that. slay, bye 🎀✨