command = "/opt/homebrew/bin/fish" # default is $SHELL

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Conterm is a native macOS terminal built on Ghostty's engine. It adds a ⌘K command palette, vertical tabs and tab groups, widgets, notifications, a command center for AI coding agents like Claude Code and opencode, and live overviews of your SSH hosts, Kubernetes clusters, and containers.

Conterm is an independent frontend built on libghostty. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Ghostty project. The terminal engine (rendering, parsing, fonts, themes, shell integration) is Ghostty's, MIT-licensed; Conterm adds the macOS app around it. Full third-party notices are in NOTICE.md.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/afbe93e9-9741-46d3-9eef-1c7b0d62ab64

Contents

• Features
• Install
• Updating
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Configuration
• Backup & restore
• Building from source
• How it fits together
• License

Features

Panes, tabs & sessions

• Recursive split panes — ⌘D splits right, ⌘⇧D splits down, to any depth. Drag the dividers to resize; focus any pane by number with ⌥1–⌥9.
• Tabs, top or sidebar — move the tab bar to a left sidebar; it can auto-hide and slide back in when the cursor reaches the left edge.
• Tab groups — color-coded groups with inline rename, reordering, and a live list of every tab in each group; in the sidebar they fold into collapsible folders.
• Session restore — every window, tab, pane, split, and working directory comes back exactly where you left it on relaunch.
• File drops & image paste — drag a file or image onto a pane to insert its shell-quoted path at the cursor; ⌘V with an image on the clipboard (browser "Copy Image", screenshot tools) pastes the same way, so agents like Claude Code can read it. Drop or paste on an SSH pane and it's uploaded instead — scp to the remote working directory, a badge on the pane while it transfers, and the remote path typed at the prompt.
• Find in scrollback (⌘F) — the terminal's own search engine highlights every match and centers the one you step to (⌘G / ⌘⇧G; ⌘E searches the selection). Panes running Claude Code add a Conversation scope over the session transcript — the only way to search a fullscreen session, whose conversation never touches scrollback — and can hand the query to Claude Code's own transcript search.

Command palette (⌘K)

One search over everything:

• A single query reaches app commands, shell history (re-run any zsh/bash command), clipboard history (recent copies from panes — session-only, never written to disk), your ~/.ssh/config hosts (with Include support), the active pane's recently modified files, built-in notes, and every open pane across every window.
• A live calculator in the search bar — arithmetic, 0x/0b/0o literals, re-basing (255 in hex), and unit conversions across data sizes, time, length, mass, volume, and temperature.
• A suggestion tray under the search bar: five picks ranked by how often and how recently you use them.
• Tab-group management, quick "open this directory in Finder / Cursor", and reorder or hide commands from Settings → Palette.

Agent-aware

• Status pills — a per-pane pill shows when Claude Code or opencode is ready, thinking, or needs you, with a notification center for what finished while you were away. Hooks are installed non-destructively.
• Command center (⌘⇧A) — a docked rail listing every running agent across all windows, needs you first. Each card shows its branch, the task it's working on, live cost / burn rate / tokens / model, and how long since it last acted — with jump-to-pane, search-in-conversation, and an inline reply / accept / interrupt. claude --bg background sessions join the roster with one-click resume, and a Next Blocked Agent palette command cycles through the agents waiting on you. A toolbar pill appears with the running count.
• Agents layout — a third window layout whose sidebar is the live agent roster; an Add agent button opens Claude Code or opencode in a directory you pick — or one you have worked in before, listed for you — and a panes dropdown jumps to any open pane. A session started somewhere Claude has never run says it is waiting on the trust prompt rather than reading as idle.
• Command markers (shell integration) — a ✓ / ✗ chip with the run time when a command fails or takes a while, a notification when a long command finishes while you've stepped away, and ⌘↑ / ⌘↓ to jump between prompts.

Hosts & clusters

• Host Overview — right-click an SSH pane (or click the ⓘ beside its title pill) for a glass briefing on the machine: load, memory, disks, network, containers, VMs, Kubernetes, crons and timers, failed units, recent journal and kernel errors, logins, and pending updates — gathered in one key-authenticated SSH round trip. A status gem sums the host: green up, amber wants attention, red in trouble.
• Fleet run — pick hosts in the palette, type one command, and get a tab with a pane per host running it over SSH — or leave the command empty to just connect everywhere.
• Kubernetes context — a tab-bar pill shows where kubectl points; production contexts turn it red and put a red glow on the focused pane's border. Click to switch context: by default a switch applies to the focused pane only (exported silently into that shell), so new panes start on your default — or flip one toggle to make switches global. Rollouts (rollout restart, set image, scale, apply) trace a progress rim around the pill as replicas come ready — green on completion, red on a stall, with notifications for both.
• Cluster Overview — every context row in the Kubernetes popover opens a briefing card on that cluster: nodes with pressure bars, workloads with per-pod health dots and ready bars, services, Helm releases, and recent warning events, across every namespace — a header chip narrows to one. An optional watcher polls pod health in the background, sums it in a status gem on the pill, and notifies when a pod starts crash-looping.
• Containers — running containers across Docker, Podman, containerd, and Apple's container in one pill, grouped by runtime in its popover; hover a row to shell in, tail its logs, or restart it.
• Ansible cockpit — running ansible-playbook in a pane mirrors the run (console untouched) into a live hosts × tasks matrix: per-cell results, task durations with a slowest callout, the changed footprint, and a failure feed with messages. A widget tracks runs across all windows and keeps the machine's most recent report across relaunches.

Orbit — the fleet as a map (beta)

Orbit is new and still settling — the shape is there, the edges are not. Treat it as beta.

• A layout mode, not a panel (⌘⇧M) — entering Orbit collapses the tab bar and gives the window to a live graph of what you are working on: your agent sessions, the hosts they talk to, the clusters and containers under them, and the plan's own running work. A session is the subject and a host is where it runs, so sessions ride the ring closest to your Mac.
• Everything happens here — Connect docks a real terminal at the foot of the canvas (⇧⌘F gives it the whole thing), overviews and logs open as panels over the map, and a run's output comes back to it. Nothing sends you out to a tab.
• Find anything (⌘K) — hosts, sessions, clusters, containers, pods and routines by name, including hosts you have never connected to and ones from ~/.ssh/config. Return brings the match to the middle and aims the action bar at it.
• Drive it from the keyboard — holding ⌥ lights a letter on every card; press it to aim there, and the arrows walk the graph from there. Every verb on the action bar has a key, and ? lists them.
• Since you looked away — leaving writes a snapshot, entering reports the difference: a session that started waiting on you, one that finished while you were gone, a scheduled run that failed, a host that came or went.
• Routines — named, parameterised, repeatable work: add a key to twelve servers, deploy, go to maintenance mode. Write the steps once, fill in the details at launch, and run them now, at a time, or after something else finishes. The engine runs app-wide, so they fire whether or not the map is on screen, and failures notify.
• What each host said — a run's history records every target separately, so a step across twelve machines reports 11/12 ok, names the one that didn't, and opens what any of them actually said.
• Guard rails on production — anything named like production (the same pattern list the Kubernetes pill uses, applied to hosts too) puts a confirmation in front of scaling, rolling, cordoning, a real Ansible run or a routine — naming what is about to happen and where.
• Drill in — a host blooms open into its containers, VMs and kubelet; a cluster into nodes, pods and containers, each with its own verbs. An overview map keeps the whole graph in one corner when you have zoomed in.

Updates and backups

• Automatic updates — checked from GitHub at launch and once a day while running; a Liquid Glass pill appears in the toolbar when a new release is out, or run Check for Updates any time. No external service involved.
• Backup & restore — save your sessions, app settings, and Conterm + Ghostty config to a single file, and restore them on another machine (Settings → Config).

Appearance

• Liquid Glass chrome (macOS 26) — refractive glass behind every surface with a Clear↔Frosted slider and light/dark tint, plus an opaque Solid mode when you want it. On macOS 14–15 the app runs fully with plain (non-glass) chrome.
• Widgets — glanceable pills in the tab bar or sidebar: system stats, clock, battery, git status, GitHub PR checks, ping, public IP (VPN-aware), notes, session streaks, Ansible runs, the kubectl context (with a click-to-switch popover), containers across runtimes (Docker, Podman, containerd, Apple's container), and a pixel cat. Enable and reorder them in Settings → Widgets.
• Interface size — one slider scales the chrome around the terminal — tab bar, sidebar, toolbar, agent rail — without touching the terminal's own font size (Settings → Interface size). Pane corners are tunable on their own axis.
• A pane that needs you says so — its border pulses amber while its agent waits on input, and so does its tab's dot, so a background tab that has stopped is visible from whichever one you are in.
• SSH-host detection in the pane chrome, and synthesized UI sound effects.

Install

Download the latest .dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag Conterm.app into Applications.

First launch: Conterm is self-signed (open-source, not notarized through a paid Apple Developer account), so the first launch needs one step: right-click Conterm.app → Open → Open. If macOS still refuses:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Conterm.app

macOS may then ask for access to folders like Documents or Downloads — that's your shell and its tools (git, kubectl, claude) reading files there, which is what a terminal does. Approve once; the grant survives updates.

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later — tested through macOS 26 (Tahoe).
• Apple Silicon (M1 or later). Intel is untested.
• Liquid Glass / blur chrome requires macOS 26; on 14–15 the app is fully functional with plain chrome.

Updating

Conterm checks GitHub for new releases at launch and once a day while running, and shows an update pill in the toolbar when one is available — click it to install and relaunch. You can also trigger it from Conterm → Check for Updates or Settings → Config, and turn the automatic check off there.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌘T / ⌘N	New tab / new window
⌘W	Close active pane (or tab)
⌘D / ⌘⇧D	Split right / split down
⌥1–⌥9	Focus pane N in the current tab
⌘1–⌘9	Jump to tab N
⌘↑ / ⌘↓	Jump to previous / next prompt
⌘K	Command palette
⌘⇧A	Agent command center
⌘⇧M	Orbit — the fleet map
⌘F	Find in scrollback / Claude conversation
⌘G / ⌘⇧G	Next / previous match
⌘E	Use selection for find
⌘,	Settings
Esc	Dismiss palette / settings / search

Configuration

Conterm reads a single file: ~/.config/conterm/config, in Ghostty's config syntax. Settings → Config shows the path and offers Open / Reload / Reset actions.

Already use Ghostty? Add a one-line include so both apps share settings:

config-file = ~/.config/ghostty/config

Edits in either file then apply to both on the next reload; anything written below the include overrides Ghostty's value for Conterm only. Safe mode (Settings → Config) boots on Ghostty's built-in defaults and ignores the file — useful for recovering from a bad edit.

A few common options:

font-family = "JetBrains Mono"
font-size = 14

cursor-style = bar             # bar | block | underline
cursor-style-blink = true

background-opacity = 0.9
background-blur = 20

# command = "/opt/homebrew/bin/fish"   # default is $SHELL

Backup & restore

From Settings → Config, Back Up writes a single .contermbackup file containing your app settings, sessions, notes, tab groups, and both the Conterm and Ghostty config files. Restore reads it back and relaunches — handy when moving to a new machine.

Building from source

Requires the Swift toolchain (Command Line Tools is enough — no full Xcode):

xcode-select --install

git clone https://github.com/mahdiarfrm/conterm.git
cd conterm

bash scripts/setup.sh    # fetch GhosttyKit.xcframework
bash scripts/build.sh    # build + assemble Conterm.app
open ./Conterm.app

scripts/build.sh produces a release, arm64, ad-hoc-codesigned Conterm.app with the bundled config, terminfo, and icon.

setup.sh fetches the prebuilt GhosttyKit at the pinned commit. Official releases instead ship a GhosttyKit built from source with the local patches in patches/ghostty/ (currently a renderer-teardown fix, reported upstream). To build that kit yourself:

bash scripts/build-ghostty.sh install   # clone pin, apply patches, zig build, install

The script fetches the pinned zig toolchain on its own if needed; the pin constants live in scripts/ghostty-pin.sh.

How it fits together

Conterm is a SwiftUI + AppKit app that drives libghostty through GhosttyKit.xcframework. Each pane owns a ghostty_surface_t and the NSView it renders into; the SwiftUI layer handles tabs, splits, the palette, and the glass chrome. The terminal core — GPU rendering, parsing, fonts and ligatures, themes, and shell integration — is entirely Ghostty's.

Sources/Conterm/
  Main.swift        @main + AppDelegate, window management
  State/            tabs, pane tree, preferences, stores
  Ghostty/          libghostty Swift bridge (surfaces, input)
  UI/               SwiftUI shell: palette, tabs, chrome, effects

Contributions and issue reports are welcome on the issue tracker.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Built on libghostty; not affiliated with the Ghostty project.