CoTerm beta

A collaborative terminal that lets you pair program with your team securely with near-zero latency

Terminal collaboration

CoTerm is a collaborative terminal in CoScreen, the video collaboration tool made for technical teams for frictionless pair programming and debugging.

  • Speed: 80% lower latency compared to traditional screen sharing by transmitting terminal content as PTY/text data while still being able to connect without friction.
  • Multi-user collaboration: Up to 10 users can view the shared terminal and collaborate within it, alongside CoScreen's video chat and multi-display screen sharing.
  • Annotations: Draw on the shared terminal to highlight code, commands, and output for other participants in addition to easy copy & pasting.
  • Security: Through the use of data encryption, RegEx pattern matching and entropy-based secret scanning and filtering, CoTerm enables you to share your terminal more securely.

How to get started

CoTerm and CoScreen are free for small teams.

  1. Download and launch CoScreen.
  2. Start a CoScreen meeting and invite your team members.
  3. Click on 'Share terminal' in the meeting menu.
Start CoTerm within CoScreen (free for small teams)

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🏁  The shared terminal will appear for you and all other participants in the CoScreen session. If you enable remote control in CoScreen, other users can type and click into your terminal.

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Give us feedback

CoTerm beta is an early version and we're already exploring a couple of additional features (e.g. abilities to disable and fine-tune secret filtering, to scroll up even when filtered, to customize your fonts, or even to bring your own terminal). Please tell us how we can make it better!

Start using CoTerm in CoScreen (it's free for small teams)

Download CoScreen

Secure collaboration

The data channel of CoScreen is used to securely transmit the encrypted PTY CoTerm data. If there are only two participants, the data channel produces a P2P, DTLS-encrypted WebRTC data channel connection between the CoScreen peers. If there are more than two participants and as a fallback method for two participants, it relies on a single secure WebSocket connection to the Jitsi VideoBridge via outgoing SSL on port 443, which makes it compatible with most corporate firewall scenarios.

To ensure the protection of sensitive information such as credentials and passwords, CoTerm has an experimental mechanism to hide suspected secrets before they are transmitted.

Secret filtering in CoTerm Beta

Among other components, this feature relies on Sensitive Data Scanner to detect potentially sensitive information in strings that would otherwise be shared with remote users. It is configured to detect various types, such as passwords, private RSA keys, GitHub API keys, tokens, credit card numbers, and social security numbers. When these strings are detected during a terminal sharing session, the scanner will replace it with wildcards before transmission. 

Note: secret filtering is an experimental feature that can’t be disabled in this first version of CoTerm. If you want to share your unredacted terminal, you can still do so via the traditional CoScreen-way: by clicking on the “Share” tab above the terminal window.

Frequently Asked Questions

Using is CoTerm is easy. Let's answer a few questions you might have before you get started.

What is CoTerm?

CoTerm is a collaborative terminal that's built into CoScreen, a video conferencing tool that's build for technical teams.

What do engineering teams use CoTerm for?

CoTerm enables frictionless pair programming, mob programming, and collaborative debugging. Engineering teams use it to write code, debug hard problems and incidents together, and help each other when connecting to sensitive systems and need someone to watch over the shoulder.

Is CoTerm available on macOS, Windows, Linux, Mobile, or Web?

macOS: yes, as part of CoScreen (download - macOS Mojave 10.14.6 and above)
Windows: yes, as part of CoScreen (download- Windows 10 and above)
Linux/Web/Mobile: not yet, sign up for the wait list

Is CoTerm secure?

Handling your data safely and securely is our top priority. CoScreen gives you more control of what you share than other tools and it runs on an enterprise-grade video infrastructure.

Learn more above and in the CoScreen Security Whitepaper

Still having questions?

Reach out to us through our contact form or by dropping us a mail to hello@coscreen.co. We're looking forward to hearing from you!