A lightweight terminal for Windows with tmux-style session persistence: closing a tab, closing the window, or even rebooting doesn't lose your terminals.
 |
 |
 |
 |
Every theme is a complete look — 80 of them, from clean classics to full scene art. Browse the whole set in the theme gallery.
- UI: Tauri (WebView2) + xterm.js with the WebGL renderer — far lighter than an Electron equivalent.
- Sessions: the same executable, launched as
gterminal --daemon, owns every shell via ConPTY (portable-pty) and outlives the window. The UI is a thin client that attaches over a localhost socket and replays each session's scrollback ring buffer. - Reboot survival: the daemon checkpoints every session (scrollback, working directory, running programs) to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\GTerminal\sessionsevery few seconds. After a reboot, sessions come back "cold": a fresh shell in the saved directory with the old scrollback replayed behind a divider. If Claude Code was running in a session,claude --continueis pre-typed so a single Enter resumes the conversation.
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
× / Ctrl+Shift+W (twice) |
Close — session enters "Closing soon" with a countdown, restorable until the timer runs out, then dies |
| Close the window | All sessions keep running; next launch restores them |
| Reboot | Sessions restored cold: cwd + scrollback, fresh shell |
exit in the shell |
Session genuinely ends |
⟳ menu / Ctrl+Shift+Z |
Restore (or kill) detached sessions |
– / Ctrl+Shift+H |
Park a tab as a pill in the bar; click to bring back |
Ctrl+Shift+B |
Toggle the session sidebar (all sessions: open/hidden/cold) |
| Double-click tab | Rename it (custom names stick) |
| Right-click tab | Context menu: rename, tab groups, hide/detach/kill |
| Right-click terminal | Menu: Copy (with selection), Paste, Select all |
Ctrl+Shift+T · Ctrl+Tab |
New tab · cycle tabs |
Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V |
Copy / paste |
Tabs shrink browser-style as they multiply; overflow collapses into a +N menu. Tabs can be organized into colored, collapsible groups (right-click a tab); groups and names persist across restarts and reboots. Tab icons show what's running inside (✳️ Claude Code, 🐍 python, 🦀 cargo, 🐳 docker, …).
"Oops" grace window: killing a session doesn't actually kill it — the tab closes but the process keeps running for 5 minutes (a ⌛ "closes in Xm" entry in the sidebar/menus restores it, cancelling the kill entirely). An accidental exit is likewise restorable from its checkpoint for the same window. Kill something twice to skip the grace. Configure with %LOCALAPPDATA%\GTerminal\config.json: {"grace_minutes": 10} (0 disables).
Config (%LOCALAPPDATA%\GTerminal\config.json, all keys optional):
{
"grace_minutes": 5,
"cursor_style": "bar",
"cursor_blink": true,
"theme": "one-dark"
}cursor_style is bar (default, Windows Terminal-like), block, or underline; cursor_blink defaults to true. Cursor settings apply to new windows/tabs.
Settings (⚙ button): theme, font family/size, line height, cursor style/blink, and the undo window — applied live and saved to config.json. Themes are a whole look, not just colors — 80 of them, each carrying its own font, line spacing, cursor personality, and backdrop art, individually overridable. The whole chrome (tab bar, sidebar, menus) recolors along with the terminal, and every theme is contrast-audited.
Sessions in their grace window get a dedicated Closing soon sidebar section with a live m:ss countdown; click to restore, × (twice) to kill immediately.
Title suggestions: right-click a tab → "Suggest title…" opens a picker with candidates computed locally from what's on the terminal — running program + folder, the last command you typed, directory paths, the shell's title. No network, always available. Optionally, configure an AI endpoint in ⚙ settings (blank = disabled, nothing is ever called): any Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible base URL (hosted API, proxy, or local gateway like Ollama), with flavor, model ID, and optional key. With an endpoint set, the picker gains "✨ Ask AI for titles…" (five candidates to choose from), and an auto-titles toggle can quietly name unnamed tabs in the background. Manual renames always win.
Requires Rust (1.85+) and Node.
npm install
npm run tauri dev # run against the vite dev server (live reload)
npm run app # standalone debug build, UI baked in
npm run tauri build # package installer
npm run test:typing # typing correctness + echo latency regression testnpm run tauri dev and a plain cargo build both produce a binary that
loads its UI from the dev server on :1420 — editing src/ reloads a
running window, and with no server up the window is blank. Use npm run app for a binary that carries the frontend inside it: that is the one to
use day to day, and the one the visual tests need (-Exe).
npm test runs both suites against isolated daemons (scratch state dirs, never your real sessions):
- typing: burst-types a payload char-by-char and asserts intact arrival, then measures per-keystroke echo latency (budget p50 < 50ms / p95 < 150ms; typical p50 ≈ 1–2ms).
- lifecycle: create/attach, scrollback replay, cwd tracking, detach-keeps-alive, soft-kill grace + restore-cancels-kill, double-kill-is-hard, typed-exit-to-trash, trash resurrection, and full reboot survival (daemon force-killed, sessions restored cold with scrollback + cwd).
Every new feature should land with coverage in one of these suites.
docs/architecture.md — the two processes, the wire between them, where session state lives, and what the test suites drive. Deeper dives: tiling panes, command blocks, and the daemon outliving the app.
- The daemon socket is unauthenticated localhost TCP; switching to a user-ACL'd named pipe is the planned hardening step.
- Scrollback checkpoints are capped at 512KB per session and flushed every 3s, so a hard cut can lose the last few seconds.
Shells: PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, and Command Prompt. Set the default in ⚙ settings; right-click the + button (tab bar or sidebar) to open a one-off tab in a specific shell. Each session remembers its shell — reboot resurrection brings back the same one. All shells get cwd tracking (PowerShell via a prompt hook, cmd via its $E]9;9;$P$E\ prompt escape).