NorviTech Helios

Suite / Helios

Helios

The desktop that sees everything your coding agents do.

A native GTK4/libadwaita workbench for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and OpenRouter models on Ubuntu.

MITAPT · Ubuntu 26.04GTK4 · PythonWayland

InstallSource on GitHubUser guide

Helios is named for the sun that, in the old stories, saw everything that happened on earth. That is the whole idea. Terminal agents are powerful and easy to lose track of: which session is waiting on you, what a command is about to touch, how much a long task has cost. Helios keeps every session in one window and puts the controls that matter — permissions, budgets, the plan you agreed to — where you can see them, not in flags.

What it does

Every session in one place

The sidebar lists every project and session on the machine with a live status dot; the transcript streams markdown, syntax-highlighted code, thinking, and one card per tool call with its result and elapsed time. Sessions keep working in the background, and a session that needs you says so.

The model, the effort and the permissions, one click each

The toolbar above the composer holds the model picker — the models the connected CLI actually ships, latest per family first — and the Execution capsule: workflow, reasoning effort and permission mode for this conversation, in one panel.

Permissions you can see

Ask, Accept edits, Auto, Bypass, Plan or Never ask, per conversation. When an agent asks, the dialog shows exactly what the CLI knows — the full command or diff, why it wants it, and the rule it would remember. A session started in your home folder is read-only whatever you pick.

A plan you own

A Work carries an objective, a definition of done and an acceptance checklist that belong to you; the model's own plan is tracked beside it and can never rewrite what you accepted. In Plan mode the agent investigates read-only and hands you the plan to approve, edit or send back.

Spend that cannot run away

Every provider has a breaker: a per-process dollar cap for Claude on per-token billing, a shared token budget for a GPT session and its subagents, and a fixed allowance plus a bounded tool loop for OpenRouter. A trip stops the work and keeps your draft.

Wears your desktop's colours

A libadwaita application: it takes the accent colour from your system settings and follows it live, and the sidebar can be translucent over your wallpaper.

Three providers, one workbench

Claude

Drives the official claude CLI you already have signed in. Its context files, history and sign-in stay the CLI's own.

GPT

Binds to a persistent Codex App Server from the codex CLI, with native approvals, plans and compaction. Optional.

OpenRouter

Runs Helios's own agent loop against any model in the live catalog, with your key in a file under ~/.helios. Optional.

Install

Ubuntu 26.04 — APT

Add the NorviTech APT repository once and sudo apt install helios; it updates with everything else. The exact two commands, and what setup.sh does, are in the README's Install section.

Other distributions — from source

Any distribution with GTK 4.10+, libadwaita 1.5+, GtkSourceView 5 and Python 3.11+ works, Ubuntu 24.04 included: clone, ./scripts/helios, and optionally ./scripts/install-desktop.sh for an app-grid entry.

Then sign in to the agents

Helios copies no credentials. Sign in to the claude CLI and, if you use them, codex login or an OpenRouter key under Settings → Providers.

Where your data lives

Transcripts stay where the CLIs put them (~/.claude/projects/…); Helios's own state — Works, goals, settings, the log, an OpenRouter key if you add one — lives under ~/.helios with restrictive permissions. Nothing is sent anywhere by Helios itself; what each provider receives is what you typed and what the agent read. The README's path-by-path table and SECURITY.md spell it out.

Documentation