cterm

A high-performance, customizable terminal emulator built in pure Rust with GTK4. Features a modular architecture designed to support alternative UI backends, with optimizations for running AI coding assistants like Claude Code.

Features

Terminal Emulation

• High Performance: Custom VT100/ANSI terminal emulator with efficient screen buffer management
• True Color Support: Full 24-bit RGB color with 256-color palette fallback
• Unicode Support: Proper handling of wide characters, combining characters, and emoji
• Scrollback Buffer: Configurable scrollback with efficient memory usage
• Find in Scrollback: Search through terminal history with regex support

User Interface

• Tabs: Multiple terminal tabs with keyboard shortcuts
• Tab Customization: Custom colors and names for tabs
• Sticky Tabs: Persistent tab configurations for frequently-used commands (great for Claude sessions)
• Themes: Built-in themes (Tokyo Night, Dracula, Nord, and more) plus custom TOML themes
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Fully configurable shortcuts for all actions
• Zoom: Adjustable font size with Ctrl+/Ctrl-

Terminal Features

• Hyperlinks: Clickable URLs with OSC 8 support
• Clipboard: OSC 52 clipboard integration for remote copy/paste
• Color Queries: OSC 10/11 color query support for theme-aware applications
• Alternate Screen: Full alternate screen buffer support (for vim, less, etc.)

System Integration

• Native PTY: Cross-platform PTY implementation (Unix openpty, Windows ConPTY ready)
• Seamless Upgrades: Update cterm without losing terminal sessions (Unix)
• Auto-Update: Built-in update checker with GitHub releases integration

Installation

Pre-built Binaries

Download the latest release from the GitHub Releases page.

Building from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.70 or later
• GTK4 development libraries

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev

Fedora:

sudo dnf install gtk4-devel

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S gtk4

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install gtk4

Build

# Development build
cargo build

# Release build (optimized)
cargo build --release

# Run
cargo run --release

The binary will be at target/release/cterm.

Configuration

Configuration files are stored in platform-specific locations:

• Linux: ~/.config/cterm/
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.cterm.terminal/
• Windows: %APPDATA%\cterm\

See docs/configuration.md for detailed configuration options.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Action	Default Shortcut
New Tab	Ctrl+Shift+T
Close Tab	Ctrl+Shift+W
Next Tab	Ctrl+Tab
Previous Tab	Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Switch to Tab 1-9	Ctrl+1-9
Copy	Ctrl+Shift+C
Paste	Ctrl+Shift+V
Find	Ctrl+Shift+F
Zoom In	Ctrl++
Zoom Out	Ctrl+-
Reset Zoom	Ctrl+0
Scroll Up	Shift+PageUp
Scroll Down	Shift+PageDown

Architecture

cterm/
├── crates/
│   ├── cterm-core/     # Core terminal emulation (parser, screen, PTY)
│   ├── cterm-ui/       # UI abstraction traits
│   ├── cterm-app/      # Application logic (config, sessions, upgrades)
│   └── cterm-gtk/      # GTK4 UI implementation
└── docs/               # Documentation

The modular architecture enables:

• cterm-core: Pure Rust terminal emulation, reusable in other projects
• cterm-ui: UI-agnostic traits for toolkit abstraction
• cterm-app: Shared application logic between UI implementations
• cterm-gtk: GTK4-specific rendering and widgets

Built-in Themes

• Default Dark
• Default Light
• Tokyo Night
• Dracula
• Nord

Custom themes can be added as TOML files in the themes/ configuration subdirectory.

Roadmap

• Text selection and improved copy/paste
• Split panes
• GPU-accelerated rendering
• Qt backend
• Sixel/iTerm2 graphics support
• Session save/restore across restarts
• Plugin system

License

MIT License

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or pull request on GitHub.