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Claim links — th://claim/<token>

The Claim in terminal → button on a contribute page opens a th://claim/<token> link. On a machine that's registered the scheme, that link goes straight into a local, read-only terminalhire claim preview <token> — no browser round-trip, no pasted command.

Register it

terminalhire protocol register     # wire th:// links to this terminal
terminalhire protocol status       # check whether it's registered
terminalhire protocol unregister   # undo it — the link falls back to a copy-paste command

terminalhire init also offers this as its last, optional step. Answering n skips it entirely — nothing is registered, and nothing else about init changes.

Registration is a one-time, local OS association:

Platform What gets registered
macOS A small AppleScript app bundle under ~/Applications, associated with the th/terminalhire URL schemes via lsregister. The first link you open may show a one-time Automation permission prompt — that's macOS asking whether the app bundle can tell your terminal to run a command, not a network request.
Windows A th/terminalhire protocol key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes, pointing at your terminalhire CLI install.
Linux A .desktop file plus an xdg-mime association for the th/terminalhire schemes.

Nothing is sent anywhere by registering — it only teaches this machine how to route a th://claim/<token> link to a local command.

If it can't open a terminal

Some machines have no interactive terminal for the OS to launch into (a headless box, a locked-down desktop with no terminal emulator found). When that happens, the link is queued to a small local file (~/.terminalhire/pending-claims.json, capped at the 20 most recent) instead of silently failing. The next time you run terminalhire bounties, claim, or hub, you'll see a one-line reminder for each queued link — after which it's cleared, so it only ever shows once.

A claim link never claims anything on its own. It only ever opens a read-only preview; recording happens separately through terminalhire claim record <id> or the local-only MCP claim_record tool — see Claims.

The fallback is always there

The terminalhire claim <token> command shown next to the button works identically whether or not you've registered the scheme — the deep link is a convenience on top of it, never a replacement for it.