Knot

Agent shells

Every shell agent’s terminal runs your own login shell, interactively ($SHELL -i), in the agent’s folder. It reads your rc files, so the agent gets the same PATH, aliases and tools as a terminal you opened yourself.

That also means it runs everything else your rc files start. Most of it is harmless, but a prompt theme that starts a background daemon per shell starts one per agent.

KNOT_AGENT

Knot sets KNOT_AGENT=1 in every agent terminal’s environment. Test it in your dotfiles to skip anything only a person at a prompt needs:

if [[ -n $KNOT_AGENT ]]; then
  # in an agent's terminal
fi

TERM and COLORTERM

Every agent terminal starts with TERM=xterm-256color and COLORTERM=truecolor, describing the terminal Knot draws: xterm sequences, the 256-colour palette and 24-bit colour. Knot sets them even if it inherited other values. When Knot is opened from Finder it has no TERM, so the shell would print TERM environment variable not set. and tools like clear would fail. When Knot is started from a terminal, it inherits that terminal’s type, such as tmux-256color, which doesn’t describe the terminal the agent runs in.

If your dotfiles set TERM themselves, they override this for that shell.

powerlevel10k

powerlevel10k starts a gitstatusd daemon, plus two helper zsh processes, for every interactive shell, to draw the prompt’s git segment. Agents don’t read the prompt, and Knot tracks git itself, so in an agent terminal those processes do nothing useful.

Add this line to ~/.p10k.zsh, after the unset -m '(POWERLEVEL9K_*|DEFAULT_USER)~POWERLEVEL9K_GITSTATUS_DIR' line near the top of the file:

  [[ -n $KNOT_AGENT ]] && typeset -g POWERLEVEL9K_DISABLE_GITSTATUS=true

It has to come after that line. The config p10k configure generates starts by unsetting every POWERLEVEL9K_* variable, including any Knot could set from outside, which is why Knot only marks the shell and leaves the choice to you. Your own terminals are unaffected: KNOT_AGENT is unset there, and their prompts keep the git segment.

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