Backed by mandō

Nothing Great Happens in the Background

Limelight is the foreground orchestration platform that takes your stalled, hidden, and forgotten processes and puts them front and center — with full I/O control, real-time continuation, and zero context loss.

Get Started Free See It In Action

limelight

$ sleep 300 &

[1] 47291

$ limelight %1

sleep 300

█

Features

Every Process Deserves the Spotlight

🎯

Smart Job Selection

No job ID? No problem. Limelight automatically surfaces the most recently backgrounded or stopped process. Zero-lookup foregrounding — the process you need, the moment you need it.

🔑

Job Spec Targeting

Pinpoint any process with our precision addressing system. Target by ID (%1), by name (%string), by substring match (%?string), or use %+ and %- for relative selection. Surgical control over your entire process estate.

⚡

SIGCONT Engine™

Stopped processes don't stay stopped. Limelight's continuation signal engine automatically resumes halted jobs the instant they hit the foreground. From frozen to running in a single operation.

📡

Full I/O Recapture

When a process moves to the foreground, stdin and stdout are seamlessly redirected back to your terminal. Full interactive control. No dangling pipes. No orphaned streams.

📋

Command Echo

Limelight writes the command line of every foregrounded job to stdout before handing you control. Complete audit trail. You always know exactly what you just surfaced.

🧹

Auto-Deregistration

Once a job enters the foreground, its process ID is cleanly removed from the known-jobs registry. No stale references. No phantom processes cluttering your execution environment.

How It Works

From Background to Front Stage in 4 Steps

Identify

Limelight scans your execution environment and inventories all backgrounded and stopped jobs. Specify a target or let the platform auto-select the most recent.

Resume

If the target process is stopped, Limelight dispatches a continuation signal (SIGCONT) to wake it from suspension. Immediate. Reliable. Zero data loss.

Redirect

Standard input and output are re-bound to your active terminal session. The process is now fully interactive — you're back in the driver's seat.

Foreground

The job is placed in the foreground process group. Its command line is echoed to stdout for auditability. The background job registry is updated. You're live.

Why Limelight

Background-Only Solutions Leave You in the Dark

Your processes deserve to be seen, interacted with, and controlled — not abandoned in the background indefinitely.

Capability	Background-Only Tools	Limelight
Bring processes to foreground	❌	✅
Auto-resume stopped jobs	❌	✅
Full stdin/stdout recapture	❌	✅
Smart job ID targeting	Basic	✅ Full spec support
Process group management	Manual	✅ Automatic
Command line audit echo	❌	✅
Clean job deregistration	❌	✅

Live

The Foreground Never Sleeps

ScaleForge foregrounded %1 — data pipeline resumed just now

NovaCraft targeted %?compile — build process back on stage 2s ago

VertexLabs auto-selected most recent job — 14ms to foreground 5s ago

DataMesh resumed stopped job via SIGCONT Engine™ 8s ago

Orbital foregrounded %- — previous job recovered 12s ago

Case Study

How DataMesh Cut Process Recovery Time by 94%

DataMesh runs a high-throughput analytics pipeline with dozens of concurrent jobs at any given moment. Before Limelight, their engineering team relied on manual process management — scrolling through job lists, guessing which PID to target, and losing interactive control the moment a process was backgrounded.

"We had engineers spending twenty minutes a day just getting back to the right process," says Tara Vance, VP of Platform Engineering at DataMesh. "Limelight's smart job selection and SIGCONT Engine changed everything. We foreground the exact process we need in under a second."

Since deploying Limelight across their infrastructure team, DataMesh has seen a 94% reduction in process recovery time, a 67% decrease in orphaned background jobs, and what Vance describes as "a fundamentally different relationship with our running processes."

"Before Limelight, background meant forgotten. Now background just means waiting for its moment in the spotlight." — Tara Vance, VP of Platform Engineering, DataMesh

94% Faster process recovery

67% Fewer orphaned jobs

0 Lost I/O contexts

What Teams Are Saying

Ship-Speed Endorsements

"We tried doing everything in the background. Turns out, some things need to be front and center. Limelight is the missing piece of our process orchestration stack."

Martin Kessler CTO, ScaleForge

"The SIGCONT Engine alone is worth the price of admission. I had three stopped build processes that I'd completely forgotten about. One command and they were all back on stage."

Amara Washington Senior Engineer, NovaCraft

"The job spec targeting is incredible. %?compile just finds the right process. No PID hunting. No guesswork. This is how foreground orchestration should work."

Ravi Patel VP Infrastructure, Orbital

"I'm a solo dev and I foreground processes dozens of times a day. Limelight's auto-select feature means I never type a job ID anymore. It just knows."

Amy Okoro Independent Developer

Pricing

Foreground Access for Every Team

Starter

Free

For individuals testing the spotlight

Auto-select most recent job only
5 foreground operations/day
Basic stdout echo
Community support

Get Started

Pro

$19/mo

Full foreground power for builders

All job spec types (%1, %+, %-)
Unlimited foreground operations
SIGCONT Engine™
Full stdin/stdout recapture
Auto-deregistration
Priority support

Start Free Trial

Team

$59/seat/mo

Collaborative foreground orchestration

Everything in Pro
Substring match (%?string)
Shared job registries
Audit logs for all foreground ops
SSO integration
Team analytics dashboard

Start Free Trial

Enterprise

Custom

For organizations running at scale

Everything in Team
Dedicated SIGCONT infrastructure
Custom I/O routing policies
99.99% SLA
Dedicated account manager
On-premise deployment option

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to my process when I foreground it?

Limelight moves the target process into the foreground process group, redirects stdin and stdout to your terminal, and sends a SIGCONT signal if the process was stopped. The command line is echoed to stdout so you always know exactly what you surfaced. The job is then removed from the background job registry.

What if I don't specify a job ID?

Limelight's smart selection automatically targets the most recently suspended or backgrounded job. It's the process you almost certainly want, surfaced without any extra input. Pro and above.

Is my data secure during foreground transitions?

Absolutely. The I/O recapture mechanism binds directly to your terminal session. No intermediate buffers, no third-party relay. Your data never leaves the execution environment during the transition.

Can I use Limelight if I prefer to keep things in the background?

Background-only workflows are valid — but incomplete. Limelight is the complement to background tooling. When the time comes to take control and interact directly, Limelight is how you get back to the process. Think of it as the return trip.

Does Limelight require job control to be enabled?

Yes. Limelight operates within job-controlled environments. If job control is not enabled, the platform will notify you with a clear error rather than perform any partial operation. Your process state is always protected.