term

A fast, small, hackable terminal emulator for Wayland.
Written in Odin, built with Nix, configured by editing one file.

Why term

• Modern protocols, done properly. Kitty keyboard protocol, the complete kitty graphics protocol (placements, animation, Unicode placeholders), sixel, synchronized output, grapheme clustering, OSC 8 hyperlinks, OSC 52 clipboard.
• Looks right. HarfBuzz shaping with ligatures, fontconfig family lookup and optional per-glyph fallback fonts, wide and CJK characters (give it a fallback font that has them), curly / dotted / dashed / coloured underlines, overline, a redefinable 256-colour palette, built-in box-drawing glyphs, scrollback that reflows when you resize.
• Themes that follow your desktop. Light and dark switching through the desktop portal, and any kitty theme works as-is.
• Plays well with tmux and ssh. term generates its own terminfo entry, ships a tmux policy file and an ssh wrapper, and a test suite compares its behaviour in 12 setups.
• Keyboard-first selection. A vim-style select mode copies and opens links without the mouse.
• Small and stateless. The whole project stays under 15 000 lines; configuration is an Odin value compiled in, in the spirit of dwm and st, so nothing is parsed, watched or out of sync with what is running.

Install

You need a Wayland compositor and Nix with flakes enabled.

nix run git+https://git.antoinevaure.fr/ant/term.git       # try it

From a checkout:

nix build && ./result/bin/term

The package also compiles and installs the term-256color terminfo entry.

Home Manager

{
  inputs.term.url = "git+https://git.antoinevaure.fr/ant/term.git";
  # ...
  imports = [ inputs.term.homeManagerModules.default ];

  programs.term = {
    enable = true;
    fontFamily = "Fira Code";           # fontconfig family, default "monospace"
    fontSize = 15;                      # pixels, default 16
    fallbackFontFamilies = [ "Symbols Nerd Font Mono" ];
    themeMode = "Auto";                 # "Auto" | "Dark" | "Light"
    kittyTheme = {                      # optional: kitty theme names per mode
      light = "Github";
      dark = "Dracula";
    };
  };
}

extraKeybinds and extraSelectKeybinds take raw Odin for a complete replacement of the key tables. If you used scripts/install_terminfo.py before, remove its copy once, so Home Manager can link the packaged one: rm ~/.terminfo/t/term-256color.

From source

nix develop
odin build . -out:term
scripts/install_terminfo.py     # once: installs the terminfo entry into ~/.terminfo

More in docs/development.md.

Using term

Keys

Keys	Action
Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V	Copy the selection / paste the clipboard
Ctrl+Shift+Space	Enter keyboard select mode
Ctrl+Shift+? / Ctrl+Shift+.	Increase / decrease the font size (6–96 px)¹
Shift+PageUp / Shift+PageDown	Scroll back / forward a page
Ctrl+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Shift+X	Jump to the previous / next shell prompt (needs shell integration marks, OSC 133 or 633)
Mouse wheel	Scroll (3 lines per notch), or forwarded to apps that track the mouse
Drag, double-click, triple-click	Select text, a word, a line (also sets the primary selection)
Hold after a double or triple click, then drag	Extend the selection by whole words or lines
Ctrl+drag or Ctrl+Shift+drag	Select a rectangle
Middle-click	Paste the primary selection
Ctrl+click on a link	Open it, even inside tmux or vim
Shift + mouse	Select even when an app has captured the mouse

¹ These match the character your layout produces with Shift held, not a physical key, so they sit on different keys on different layouts; edit the table in config.odin if yours is awkward.

Select mode (Ctrl+Shift+Space) works on the scrollback and on full-screen apps alike. Other keys are swallowed until you leave.

Keys	Action
h j k l	Move
w b e / W B E	Word motions (small / big word)
0 $	Start / end of line
g G	Oldest scrollback line / newest line
Ctrl+U Ctrl+D	Half page up / down
v V Ctrl+V	Select by character / line / block (press again to cancel)
y	Copy the selection to the clipboard
o	Open the link under the cursor, or the first one in the selection
Esc	Clear the selection, then leave select mode

Links

OSC 8 hyperlinks and plain URLs (http://, https://, mailto:, file://, and a bare www.) are underlined under the pointer, which turns into a hand; Ctrl+click opens them with xdg-open. url_detection in config.odin limits detection to Schemes or turns it Off. A link the application declares (OSC 8) always wins over a detected one. Detected URLs follow soft and hard line wraps (tmux, pagers), stop at quotes, brackets and borders, and are ignored when cut short with ….

Command line

term [--class APP_ID] [--working-directory DIR] [--log-pty FILE] [-e COMMAND [ARGS...]]
term --version | --print-terminfo | --replay FILE

Flag	Meaning
-e cmd args…	Run a command instead of $SHELL
--class APP_ID	Wayland app id, for window rules (default term)
--working-directory DIR	Start in a directory
--log-pty FILE	Record what apps send and what term answers (never your keystrokes)
--replay FILE	Replay a recording headless and summarise it
--print-terminfo	Print the terminfo source term generates
--version	Print the commit it was built from

Configuration

Settings live in config.odin, one Odin value that you edit and rebuild with nix build or odin build . (with Home Manager, the options above set the common ones for you). The ones people reach for:

Field	Default
font_family	"monospace"	Fontconfig family; bold and italic faces are found for you
fallback_font_families	none	Consulted per glyph, in order, when the main font lacks it
font_size	16	Pixels; step and range are font_size_step, font_size_min, font_size_max
theme_mode	Auto	Auto follows the desktop's light/dark setting; or force Dark / Light
theme_dark_overrides, theme_light_overrides	none	Replace individual palette entries per mode
scrollback_capacity	2000	Rows kept on the main screen
default_cursor_shape	Block	Block, Underline, Bar; apps can change it
block_select_mods	Ctrl, Ctrl+Shift	Modifier combinations that make a drag select a rectangle
url_detection	Schemes_And_Www	Schemes, or Off for OSC 8 only
osc52_read	true	Let programs read the clipboard; false answers with an empty reply
kitty_local_media	true	Let graphics clients name files and shared memory; see the issue
keybinds, select_keybinds	see above	The key tables themselves

Colours

The palette can also come from a file, read at startup and again on SIGUSR1: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/term/theme (else ~/.config/term/theme). It overrides foreground, background and color0…color15. Both color1=ff5555 and kitty's color1 #ff5555 lines work, so a kitty theme can be copied or symlinked there unchanged, and a missing file changes nothing. Home Manager's kittyTheme.light and kittyTheme.dark select separate Kitty palettes, stored in term/theme-light and term/theme-dark beside the shared file. themeMode selects which applies (Auto follows the desktop); each defaults to null, keeping that mode's built-in palette. These files are also read at startup and on SIGUSR1. The shared term/theme file overrides either mode's palette; nix/noctalia-theme.tmpl is a template for generating it from the Noctalia shell's colours. The previous string-valued kittyTheme = "Name" option is replaced by this light/dark attribute set.

Browse themes live with the picker, inside term:

nix run .#theme-preview          # arrows to move, type to filter,
                                 # Enter keeps it for this window, Esc restores
nix run .#theme-preview -- --list --dark

It uses the standard colour sequences any program may send (OSC 4 for entries 0–15, OSC 10 and 11 to set, OSC 104, 110 and 111 to reset). Those change only that window, survive a theme-file reload, and are not cleared by a terminal reset.

tmux, ssh and other hosts

term-256color is an entry only your machine has. For ssh there is a wrapper that installs it on first login (or falls back to xterm-256color), and tmux needs one source-file line to pass Shift+Enter and friends through. Everything else, plus how to debug a misbehaving setup, is in docs/tmux-and-ssh.md.

Every detectable feature, with whether term implements it and how it looks inside tmux and over ssh, is tabulated in docs/capabilities.md.

Not there yet

No bell or desktop notifications, HiDPI / fractional scaling, input methods (IME), scrollback search, tabs or splits, client-side decorations, overline, working-directory reports (OSC 7) and colour emoji. Software rendering only. The kitty graphics protocol is complete apart from a few caveats listed in issues/. Plans are in ROADMAP.md.

Contributing

docs/development.md covers building and testing, AGENTS.md the code style and the design principles. Found a bug that is not being fixed right now? Add a file to issues/.