README.md

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

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
⌘ D · ⌘ ⇧ D	split right · split down
⌘ ] · ⌘ [	next pane · previous pane
⌘ ⏎ · ⌘ ⇧ ⏎	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

The full list — and any overrides — lives in Settings → Keybindings.

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