tty7

A GPU-rendered terminal in pure Rust.

_{GPU rendering on Zed's gpui · VT core from Alacritty}

Why tty7 · Install · Features · Benchmarks · Keybindings

_{English · 简体中文}

Why tty7

• Fast — about 2× the throughput of Alacritty, Ghostty, or Kitty on the same hardware (benchmarks)
• A modern prompt — completion, syntax highlighting, and history search built in; no plugins to assemble
• Sessions that survive — close the window or quit the app, your shells keep running; no tmux
• Zero config — zsh, bash, fish, and PowerShell work out of the box

Native builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux ship with every release.

Install

Download the build for your platform from Releases:

• macOS — tty7-<version>-macos-arm64.dmg (Apple Silicon) or …-x86_64.dmg (Intel); open it and drag tty7.app into Applications.
• Windows — …-windows-x86_64-setup.exe (installer: Start Menu shortcut + uninstall entry), or …-windows-x86_64.zip (portable: unzip and run tty7.exe).
• Linux — …-linux-x86_64.AppImage (recommended: bundles the x11/wayland libraries, so it runs on Fedora / Arch / etc. with no extra packages — chmod +x and run), or …-linux-x86_64.tar.gz (bare binary; extract and run ./tty7, needs the usual x11/wayland runtime libraries installed).

Features

At the prompt

• Ghost suggestions — your history completes the whole line as you type; → to accept
• Tab completion that explains — every flag and subcommand with its description, for ~100 common commands
• Syntax highlighting — as you type, nothing to install
• Fuzzy history search — ⌃ R shows what you ran, where, and whether it failed
• History from day one — your existing shell history just works, and carries across sessions
• Real line editing — selection, word motion, undo

In the window

• Tabs & splits — always open in the current directory
• Command palette ⌘ P · scrollback search ⌘ F
• ⌘-click links · desktop notifications
• Eight themes · CJK / IME input

CLI coding agents

tty7 recognizes third-party coding agents running in a pane (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Aider, Amp, OpenCode, and ~10 more) and enriches them — it never wraps or replaces the agent.

• Brand avatars — the tab chip / sidebar row shows which agent runs where; custom wrappers map in via agent_commands in config.json
• Live status dot — working (blue) / needs your input (amber) / done (green), driven by agent-reported events over an OSC channel; run Agent: Install Claude Code Hooks from the palette to wire Claude Code up
• Notifications that matter — "needs your permission…" the moment an agent blocks on you, and "finished after Ns" per turn, honoring your notification policy
• Branch at a glance — each sidebar row shows its pane's git branch and working-tree diff (+N −M), refreshed on cd and when a command finishes
• Session resume — panes lost to a reboot re-launch their agent conversation (claude --resume …) on restore (restore_agent_sessions, on by default)
• Context feed — palette commands send the current selection or the repo's git diff to the running agent as a ready-made prompt

SSH connection manager

A native Rust SSH stack (russh) is the only path — profiles, credentials, and SFTP without ever shelling out to ssh. There is no system-ssh compat mode.

• QuickConnect — type user@host[:port] in the palette and connect; IPv6 [::1]:port supported
• Saved profiles — full connection config with passwords / passphrases in the OS keychain, never on disk
• ~/.ssh/config aliases — type one to connect (resolved natively — common fields, best-effort — over russh), or import them as profiles in Settings
• GUI auth — in-pane sheets for password, key passphrase, 2FA, and host-key confirmation (new vs. changed)
• Built-in SFTP — a slide-in file panel: browse, upload / download, rename / delete / chmod, drag to Finder
• Port forwarding — Local / Remote / Dynamic, preconfigured or added live, plus ⌘-click localhost:PORT to auto-forward
• Jump hosts & proxies — multi-hop via profile references or ProxyJump, ProxyCommand, SOCKS5 / HTTP

Entry point	Connects via
Saved profiles · QuickConnect · typed user@host[:port]	Native russh — SFTP · keychain · GUI auth · L/R/D forwards
~/.ssh/config aliases	Resolved natively, then russh (Match/canonicalize/GSSAPI unsupported — no fallback)

Benchmarks

All four terminals measured back-to-back on the same machine, same day, same 155×40 grid — Apple M1 Pro, macOS 26.3.1, five-run averages (2026-07-04):

	tty7	Alacritty	Ghostty	Kitty
Plaintext IO — 11 MB cat (lower = better)	95 ms	239 ms	179 ms	185 ms
DOOM-fire frame rate (higher = better)	888 fps	485 fps	552 fps	617 fps
Cold-launch memory	116 MB¹	105 MB	128 MB	130 MB

_{¹ GUI 105 MB + the persistent daemon 11 MB.}

Where the speed comes from:

• The PTY is read at device speed and parsed in large batches, off the render path
• Hot paths are lock-free — a big cat never waits on drawing
• The daemon buffers up to 16 MiB ahead of the window before backpressure applies

Methodology (how each terminal is driven, grid fairness, known pitfalls) and one-command reproduction live in scripts/bench/ — run it yourself.

Keybindings

Keys are shown in macOS notation — on Windows and Linux, read ⌘ as Ctrl. Open Settings with ⌘ , to browse or remap them all. The essentials:

⌘ T · ⌘ W · ⌘ ⇧ T	new tab · close tab · reopen closed tab
⌘ 1…⌘ 9 · ⌃ ⇥ · ⌃ ⇧ ⇥	jump to tab 1–9 · next tab · previous tab
⌘ D · ⌘ ⇧ D	split right · split down
⌘ ] · ⌘ [	next pane · previous pane
⌘ ⌥ ←→↑↓	focus the pane in that direction
⌘ ⏎ · ⌘ ⇧ ⏎	toggle fullscreen · maximize / restore the pane
⌘ K	clear the screen and scrollback
⌘ P	command palette
⌘ F	search the scrollback
⌃ R	fuzzy-search shell history
⌘ + · ⌘ − · ⌘ 0	font size up · down · reset

Settings → Keybindings lists every shortcut. Click one, press the new keys (Esc cancels, Backspace resets to default), and it takes effect immediately. Pane resize and swap have no default keys — bind them here or run them from the command palette. Prefer tmux muscle memory? Flip the tmux preset to remap pane/tab actions onto a prefix (default ⌃ B): ⌃ B C opens a tab, ⌃ B % splits, ⌃ B then an arrow moves focus. A bare prefix reaches the shell after a brief pause, and prefix + an unbound key is passed straight through to the terminal.

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