Skyterm — a GPU terminal emulator

Wanted to share a new project I’ve been working on, Skyterm.

Its a terminal emulator built in Rust (with Claude), that aims to be the successor to one of my favorite terminals, Terminator.

Why another term emulator?

On linux, the terminal emulator choice is huge

• Terminator
• Ghostty
• Alacritty
• Tilix
• KDE terminal
• Kitty
• etc

The vast majority of them do the same thing, they can open up tabs, windows, panes, most are configurable for keyboard shortcuts, workflows, themes, etc

Some newer ones like Kitty, Ghostty, etc have modern features like GPU-rendering

But all share the same shortcoming for me, they all require reading documentation, setting up a working environment and downloading or configuring themes and profiles to make it unique to your style, and many are missing basic features like pane splitting, usable Menu or customization options

How is Skyterm different?

Skyterm takes the best features from most of these emulators and bakes in a ready to go out-of-box experience for the user.

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The aim of Skyterm is to be a simple, easy to use terminal emulator that has everything baked in out of box for a user to be productive — without messing with configurations, themes or reading documentation.

Skyterm takes everything great about Terminator, and adds some killer features.

• Split panes, windows, tabs, via right click menu or a keyboard shortcut (just like Terminator)
• has native GPU rendering if a GPU is available — this means very fast glyph rendering when scrolling through massive amount of text
• has 7 dark and 6 light themes available right out of box, baked in — no configs to mess with or docs to read
• keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and flexible, can use either Skyterm shortcuts or Terminator shortcuts
• default Pane layout option on startup
• Many modern term emulators remove a right click menu entirely, which forces you to remember every single keyboard shortcu.
  Skyterm offers a sane right click menu and options — for users who dont want to remember shortcuts.

skyterm menu

• Tons of customizable user-specific settings available from menu or from a config file ~/.config/skyterm/config.toml

all options in this menu are available via a config.toml file

• draggable and movable tabs and panes — all panes can be moved, resized and modified by simple drags

I’ve been using Skyterm as my primary terminal emulator for past 3 months and it has now become the only terminal that I use daily, both for work and home projects.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

README has full details of all available options and keyboard bindings.

https://github.com/perfecto25/skyterm

see Releases page for OS installers — available for Linux and MacOS