Driving panes

This is the everyday loop: from inside one pane, inspect and drive the others. Everything here is available as a loom subcommand (shell out) and as a loom mcp tool (for agents) — same operations, same routing. This guide is the task-oriented tour; the CLI & MCP reference has every flag.

All of these only do something from a process launched inside a Loom pane. Outside Loom they are inert no-ops (see Core concepts).

See who’s around — list

loom list

Lists every pane: name, live/dead, workspace, and a * on the focused one. This is where you get the display names you’ll target with everything else.

Type into a pane — send

loom send Cleo "run the integration suite"

Everything after the pane name is joined with spaces, typed into that pane, and submitted with Enter. Two things worth knowing:

• Don’t submit yet: add --no-enter to stage a line without pressing Enter — handy when a human should review before it runs.

• Pipe from stdin: with no text, send reads stdin, so both of these work:

  echo "here's the prompt" | loom send Cleo
  git log --oneline -5 | loom send Cleo

Open a new pane — spawn

loom spawn --name reviewer --cwd /repo claude

Opens a new pane running a command and returns the new pane’s name. The first non-flag token starts the command, and everything after it is taken verbatim — dashes included — so loom spawn --name worker claude --resume passes --resume to claude, not to loom. To be explicit about where flags end, use --:

loom spawn --name w -- claude --resume

Read a pane’s scrollback — read

loom read Cleo -n 200

Captures the tail of a pane’s scrollback (default tail; -n/--lines to bound it). This is an explicit, requested snapshot — you asked for it. It’s not output-scraping: Loom still never watches the stream as a signal, it just answers when you ask for a read.

Fan out to everyone — broadcast

loom broadcast "pull main and rebase"

Sends the text to every live pane in the active workspace (-w/--workspace targets another). This is the one-to-many fan-out, and it’s agent-driven — there’s no human broadcast bar. Like send, it takes --no-enter and reads stdin when given no text.

Jump to a pane — focus

loom focus reviewer

Switches to the pane’s workspace and focuses it.

A few patterns

# Delegate to a peer
loom send Cleo "run the tests and report back"

# Spin up a helper agent, then brief it
loom spawn --name reviewer --cwd /repo claude
loom send reviewer "review the diff on branch X"

# Pull a peer's recent output on demand
loom read Cleo -n 200

Be courteous. send and broadcast type into someone else’s terminal. Don’t spam, and prefer --no-enter when a human should get the last word before a command runs.

Next: flag yourself blocked or label what you’re doing with Attention & status.