A terminal for Windows, macOS and Linux
AntiTerm draws its text on the graphics card, finds folders, files and past commands as you type, and brings its own Linux-style shell and commands to every computer, Windows included.
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AntiTerm 1.0.1 is available now, and it is free. Download AntiTerm
Live, animated scenes behind your text, across every window and monitor. Black hole: its disk turns, and it bends light. Planetarium: planets where they really are now, moving in real time, the Earth turning under clouds, the sun's flare. Deep sea: creatures drift past. Off until you turn them on; they run at full display rate without slowing your work.
These are stills of animated scenes, shown because reduced motion is on.
AntiTerm comes with its own shell and its own versions of the everyday Linux commands. They work the same on Windows, macOS and Linux, with no WSL needed on Windows.
AntiTerm's shell runs POSIX shell scripts and has the everyday comforts of bash: emacs and vi editing, Tab completion, aliases, job control and suggestions from your history as you type. PowerShell, cmd, Git Bash and WSL stay one key away.
ls, grep, sed, ps, top and the rest are built into the shell, so they start at once with nothing read from disk. Each is also a separate program for your scripts, and --version and type tell you when a command is AntiTerm's own.
The prompt shows your folder, the git branch and its state, the last command's exit status and how long it took, in your theme's colours. Every setting lives in AntiTerm's own settings file; your dotfiles are never written.
ps takes the options you already know, such as aux, auxf and -ef, on every system. top adds a bar for each core, a process tree and search as you type.
Folders, files and the commands you ran before appear as you type, from an index kept on your computer.
Type j and part of a folder's name. Folders are ranked by how often and how recently you use them, and every folder on your computer can be found before your first visit.
Ctrl+R shows the closest matches as you type, so gco mn finds git checkout main, and each command shows when and where it ran, whether it worked and how long it took. Commands that look like passwords or keys are never kept.
Search file names and the text inside files from the prompt, using the same index. A file kept only in the cloud is never downloaded by a search.
A double click picks a whole web address, e-mail address, phone number, date or IBAN. A triple click picks a whole line, even when it wraps.
AntiTerm draws on the graphics card. Reading output, scrolling and searching run on threads of their own, so the window answers at once.
| From key press to its echo on screen | median 15.7 ms, 95 % within 16.7 ms |
|---|---|
| Frames while 17.7 MB of output scrolled | 142 a second, none over its time budget |
| Time to build a frame | median 0.64 ms, at most 0.99 ms |
| Scroll-back holding 2 000 000 lines | 5.1 MB in memory |
Every letter starts on a whole pixel, so it looks the same in every column. Box lines, blocks and powerline shapes are drawn as shapes that meet their neighbours exactly.
Ctrl with the mouse wheel, or a pinch, zooms the text at your display's full rate, and the line you are working on stays where it is.
Lines that leave the screen are packed tightly, and older ones are kept in a private file on disk, so a long session stays small in memory.
AntiTerm draws with the graphics card, or with the processor on a computer that has no suitable graphics card. Each window draws on its own thread.
A small session host keeps every shell and its scroll-back. When you close AntiTerm, the next window picks up where the last one left off.
Programs keep running when a window is closed, and the next window joins them again. A split can be sent to the background and brought back from the list of sessions.
Split the window across and down, open tabs, and pull a tab out into a window of its own. A set of tmux keys comes with it.
nvim, vim, Emacs, tmux, less and top work in full, and are tested with every shell AntiTerm offers.
Tabs, splits, folders and scroll positions come back when AntiTerm starts. Start fresh opens a clean window once, and your saved session is kept.
Each split can be read and driven from outside, through a local command line, with a key you make and only the rights you give it.
Each key has only the rights you give it: read the screen, type, run commands, set rules or change settings. The connection is open only to your own user account, and every action is logged.
When an AI agent in a split stops before its goal, AntiTerm sends the message you wrote once for each stop, until the agent says it is done, until a command such as your tests passes, or until a limit is reached. Your typing always wins, and one key stops it.
A rule watches a split for a word, a pattern or a question such as "should I continue?", and answers by typing, running a command or letting you know. Each answer is shown and logged.
Text can be sent to an AI command line running in a split, from AntiTerm itself or from another program on your computer.
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, the Indic scripts and emoji are shaped and placed correctly in their cells.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters take two cells and never overlap the next one. Accents and emoji sequences stay whole.
Arabic and Hebrew are joined and run right to left. Input methods compose the text right at the cursor.
Drop a PDF or a Word document onto the window, and it splits to show the document as text with its pictures. Code from it can be copied to the prompt.
On a computer with two systems, ls and the other commands read the other system's disks without mounting them: NTFS, FAT, exFAT, ext4, btrfs, XFS, APFS and more.
A long command finishing in a split you cannot see, or an AI agent waiting for you, shows a notification from your system. Clicking it brings that split forward.
The same AntiTerm on all three, with the same shell, commands and look.
Get it from the Microsoft Store on Windows, as a signed disk image on macOS, and as a .deb or an Arch package on Linux.
