I didn't like any terminal, so I built one in 3 days

Let me get the confession out of the way first: I'm picky, and I'm a bit of a

clown about it. I spend my whole day in a terminal, and none of them made me

happy.

Here's the trap every terminal walks you into:

  the Electron ones .......... gorgeous, but ~200 MB idle and laggy

  the hyper-minimal ones ..... blazing fast, but no tabs, no plugins

  the power-user ones ........ endless config, dated UX you fight

  the slick modern ones ...... closed-source, account-walled, telemetry

  the deeply-integrated ones . great, but locked to one OS

The Rust ones are genuinely fast, and I love that, but the UI tends to feel like

you're editing a config file that happens to have a blinking cursor. The

good-looking ones? Half of them are Electron, or some other webview contraption

that boots a whole browser to render a grid of characters. No thanks.

So I did the unreasonable thing and built my own. It's called terminale.

What it is

A native, GPU-accelerated terminal written in Rust, the same on Windows, macOS

and Linux. One codebase, three OSes, identical behaviour. No Electron, no

webview, no telemetry. It draws through wgpu (Vulkan / Metal / DX12 / GL) with

a glyph atlas, ligatures, and a custom borderless title bar.

What already works and is covered by tests:

• Cross-platform PTY shell (ConPTY on Windows, openpty on Unix)


• Multi-tab, reopen-closed-tab, drag-around, Chrome-style tab groups


• Split panes (horizontal/vertical, nestable), with the inactive ones dimmed


• A proactive AI suggestion bar that reads recent output and proposes the next
  command, with an Inject button (it never auto-runs anything)


• A command palette and an inline AI assistant (Claude, OpenAI, or local Ollama)


• 12 built-in themes with live switching, plus your own in TOML


• Full-scrollback search, clickable links (OSC 8 / URLs / file:line:col)


• Quake drop-down mode and window snapping


• A sandboxed Lua plugin host


• A native settings window where every tunable thing actually has a control


• And the newest toy: a pixel-art CPU/RAM/GPU strip tucked into the dead space
  at the bottom of the window, so it never steals a single row from your shell

The look

The identity is on purpose: a pixel-art mark, a wide rainbow of loud themes

(Matrix, Tokyo Night, Dracula, and friends), and a borderless custom chrome. It

looks like a terminal from a game that should exist, with a serious

GPU-accelerated emulator under the hood. Fast and feature-rich, but also fun to

look at. I refuse to apologize for that.

The part people will ask about

I built it in three days.

Not because I'm a wizard, but because I had a very fast, very patient pair:

I wrote the whole thing on Claude Code. Every line was prompt-engineered, not

typed by hand. I drove the design, the trade-offs, the "no, do it this way";

the model did the heavy lifting at a pace I could never match solo. Three days

from "I'm annoyed at my terminal" to installers for three operating systems,

green CI, and a real release pipeline.

It is genuinely strange to watch an idea become a shippable cross-platform app

that quickly. I'm still a little suspicious of it. In a good way.

Try it

Open source, dual MIT/Apache. Installers for Windows, macOS and Linux are out,

plus a Homebrew tap and one-line installers. Grab it, theme it, break it, and

tell me what's wrong with it — I want the brutal feedback.

terminale — the cross-platform terminal that doesn't suck | Stackbyte

Native, GPU-accelerated, cross-platform terminal in Rust. Multi-tab, split panes, inline AI, Quake mode. No Electron. No telemetry. Open source.

stackbyte.dev

If you build a theme you love, send it. The rainbow always has room for more.

Tags: rust, terminal, opensource, devtools