par-term

A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator frontend built with Rust, powered by par-term-emu-core-rust. Designed for high performance, modern typography, and rich graphics support.

What's New in 0.4.0

🗂️ Multi-Tab Support

Each window now supports multiple terminal tabs, each with its own independent PTY session.

• New Tab: Cmd+T (macOS) / Ctrl+T to create a new tab
• Close Tab: Cmd+W closes tab (or window if single tab)
• Tab Switching: Cmd+Shift+[ / Cmd+Shift+] or Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
• Direct Tab Access: Cmd+1 through Cmd+9 to switch to specific tabs
• Tab Reordering: Cmd+Shift+Left/Right to move tabs
• Duplicate Tab: Create new tab with same working directory
• Tab Bar: Visual tab bar with close buttons, activity indicators, and bell icons
• Configurable: Tab bar visibility (always, when_multiple, never), height, and styling

🪟 Multi-Window Support

Spawn multiple independent terminal windows, each with its own PTY session and tabs.

• New Window: Cmd+N (macOS) / Ctrl+N to open a new terminal window
• Close Window: Cmd+W (macOS) / Ctrl+W to close the current window
• Independent Sessions: Each window runs its own shell process with separate scrollback and state
• Clean Shutdown: Application exits when the last window is closed

📋 Native Menu Bar

Cross-platform native menu support using the muda crate.

• macOS: Global application menu bar with standard macOS conventions
• Windows/Linux: Per-window menu bar with GTK integration on Linux
• Full Keyboard Accelerators: All menu items have proper keyboard shortcuts

Menu Structure

🎨 Custom Shader Enhancements

• Texture Channels: Shadertoy-compatible iChannel1-4 texture support for custom images in shaders
• Brightness Control: custom_shader_brightness setting to dim shader backgrounds for better text readability
• Cursor Shader Options: cursor_shader_hides_cursor allows shaders to fully replace cursor rendering
• New Shaders: Added clouds, happy_fractal, bumped_sinusoidal_warp, cursor_orbit effects

🏗️ Architecture Improvements

• TabManager: New multi-tab coordinator manages tab lifecycle within each window
• WindowManager: Multi-window coordinator handles window lifecycle and menu events
• WindowState: Per-window state cleanly separated from application-level state
• Event Routing: Events properly routed to the correct window and tab

What's New in 0.3.0

🎨 Ghostty-Compatible Cursor Shaders

Full support for cursor-based shader animations compatible with Ghostty custom shaders.

• Cursor Uniforms: iCurrentCursor, iPreviousCursor, iCurrentCursorColor, iTimeCursorChange uniforms for cursor trail effects
• Configurable Cursor Color: New cursor color setting in the UI, exposed as iCurrentCursorColor to shaders
• Cursor Style Toggle: Cmd+, (macOS) / Ctrl+, to cycle through Block, Beam, and Underline cursor styles
• Built-in Cursor Shaders: Includes sweep, warp, glow, blaze, trail, ripple, and boom effects
• Geometric Cursor Rendering: Proper visual rendering for all cursor styles (Block, Beam, Underline)

🐚 Shell & Terminal Fixes

• Login Shell Support: Fixed issues with login shell initialization and environment loading

🖼️ Shader Editor Improvements

• Filename Display: Background and cursor shader editors now show the filename being edited in the window header

What's New in 0.2.0

🔋 Intelligent Redraw Loop (Power Efficiency)

Significantly reduced CPU and GPU usage by switching from continuous polling to event-driven rendering.

• Smart Redraws: Redraws are only requested when terminal content changes or when animations (scrolling, cursor blink, shaders) are active.
• Improved Battery Life: Implemented ControlFlow::Wait logic, allowing the application to sleep during inactivity instead of maxing out VSync.

🛡️ Robustness & Stability

• Fixed Dropped Input: Resolved a critical issue where keystrokes and paste operations could be silently discarded during heavy rendering.
• parking_lot Mutex Migration: Migrated to parking_lot to eliminate Mutex poisoning risks.
• Graceful Audio Fallback: Prevents crashes if audio output devices are missing; the terminal bell now fails gracefully.

Features

Core Terminal Frontend

• Cross-platform Support: Native performance on macOS (Metal), Linux (Vulkan/X11/Wayland), and Windows (DirectX 12).
• Multi-Window & Multi-Tab: Multiple windows with independent tab sessions per window.
• GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Powered by wgpu with custom glyph atlas for blazing-fast text rasterization.
• Inline Graphics: Full support for Sixel, iTerm2, and Kitty graphics protocols.
• Real PTY Integration: Full pseudo-terminal support for interactive shell sessions.
• Advanced Sequence Support: VT100/VT220/VT320/VT420/VT520 compatibility via par-term-emu-core-rust.
• Intelligent Reflow: Full content reflow on window resize, preserving scrollback and visible state.

Modern UI & Visuals

• Custom WGSL Shaders: High-performance scrollbar and post-processing effects.
• Background Images: Support for PNG/JPEG backgrounds with configurable opacity and scaling modes.
• Transparency: True per-pixel alpha transparency (macOS CAMetalLayer optimization).
• Visual Bell: Flash-based alerts for terminal bell events.
• Dynamic Themes: Support for iTerm2-style color schemes (Dracula, Monokai, Solarized, etc.).

Typography & Fonts

• Styled Font Variants: Explicit support for separate Bold, Italic, and Bold-Italic font families.
• Unicode Range Mapping: Assign specific fonts to Unicode ranges (perfect for CJK, Emoji, or Symbols).
• Text Shaping: HarfBuzz-powered shaping for ligatures, complex scripts, and emoji sequences.
• Smart Fallback: Automatic system font discovery and fallback chain.

Selection & Clipboard

• Advanced Selection: Block/Rectangular, Line-based, and Word-based selection modes.
• Multi-platform Clipboard: Seamless integration with system clipboards via arboard.
• Middle-click Paste: Standard Unix-style middle-click paste support.
• Automatic Copy: Optional "copy on select" behavior.

Hyperlinks & URL Detection

• OSC 8 Support: Native support for application-provided hyperlinks.
• Regex Detection: Automatic detection of URLs in terminal output.
• Interactive Links: Ctrl+Click to open links in your default browser, with hover highlighting and tooltips.

Documentation

• Quick Start Guide - Get up and running with custom fonts.
• Architecture Overview - High-level system architecture and components.
• Custom Shaders Guide - Install and create custom GLSL shaders for backgrounds and cursor effects.
• Compositor Details - Deep dive into the rendering architecture.
• Examples - Comprehensive configuration examples.
• Core Library - Documentation for the underlying terminal engine.

Installation

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install --cask paulrobello/tap/par-term

From Source

Requires Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) and modern graphics drivers:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term
cd par-term

# Build and run (debug)
cargo run

# Build optimized release version
cargo build --release
./target/release/par-term

macOS Bundle

To create a native macOS .app bundle with a dock icon:

make bundle
make run-bundle

Linux Dependencies

On Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), you need GTK3 and X11/Wayland libraries:

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libasound2-dev

Keyboard Shortcuts

Window & Tab Management

Navigation & Editing

UI Toggles

Configuration

Configuration is stored in YAML format:

• Unix: ~/.config/par-term/config.yaml
• Windows: %APPDATA%\par-term\config.yaml

cols: 80
rows: 24
font_size: 13.0
font_family: "JetBrains Mono"
theme: "dark-background"
window_opacity: 0.95
scrollbar_position: "right"

# Tab bar settings
tab_bar_mode: "when_multiple"  # always, when_multiple, never
tab_bar_height: 28.0
tab_show_close_button: true
tab_inherit_cwd: true

# Custom shader settings
custom_shader: "starfield.glsl"
custom_shader_enabled: true
custom_shader_brightness: 0.3  # Dim shader for readability
custom_shader_channel1: "~/textures/noise.png"  # Optional texture

See examples/config-complete.yaml for a full list of options.

Technology

• Terminal Engine: par-term-emu-core-rust
• Graphics: wgpu (WebGPU for Rust)
• Text: swash + rustybuzz (custom glyph atlas)
• UI: egui for settings and overlays
• Windowing: winit
• Async: tokio

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please ensure you run make checkall before submitting any pull requests.

make fmt       # Format code
make lint      # Run clippy
make test      # Run test suite
make checkall  # Run all of the above

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Paul Robello - probello@gmail.com

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term
• Core Library: https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term-emu-core-rust