A small, fast native terminal emulator for macOS — Rust on AppKit, multi-tab sessions in a self-drawn sidebar, and a dependency-free VT/ANSI core. macOS 12 or later.
- Tabs & groups — one PTY per tab (⌘T), organized into named collapsible groups, dragged to reorder. ⌘F filters the list; double-click a name to rename it.
- Live session state — each row's icon shows running / at a prompt / exited, and marks a background tab that printed something unseen or rang the bell. Click an icon to color the row.
- Themes — 12 built-in, six dark and six light; the whole UI derives from the active one. Plain
data, not code: edit
~/.tabt/themes.confto change one or add your own. - Settings (⌘,) — Theme (a grid of live preview cards), Appearance (9 monospace fonts, size, sidebar side, padding, opacity), Toolbar, Terminal (cursor, blink, scrollback), Shell. Applied live, saved at once.
- A toolbar you arrange by dragging it — AI launchers (Claude and Codex out of the box; Gemini, Aider and Cursor in the palette) that type their command and press Return, plus session actions: clear, screenshot, export text, reveal in Finder, and more. The Toolbar settings pane is the toolbar itself, at full size: drag a button to reorder it, or out of its row to put it away.
- Mouse support in TUIs — clicks, drags and the wheel reported to vim/tmux/htop/lazygit in both the legacy and SGR encodings; hold ⇧ to select text instead.
- VT/ANSI core — SGR colors and attributes, cursor/scroll/erase, alternate screen, DEC private modes, IRM, tab stops, line-drawing charset, DSR/DA, OSC title and cwd, UTF-8, wide characters.
- Persistence — layout, groups, tabs, theme, font, window position and size restored on launch. A restored session's shell starts the first time you open that tab, so a twenty-tab layout costs one shell at launch rather than twenty.
Download TabT-<version>.dmg from the latest release
and drag TabT to Applications.
The image is not notarized, so Gatekeeper refuses it on first launch: right-click the app and
choose Open (or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/TabT.app) once. Building it
yourself avoids that.
Requires macOS and a Rust toolchain (rustup.rs).
git clone https://github.com/hex2null/TabT.git tabt && cd tabt
make run # build, bundle into dist/TabT Dev.app, code-sign, launch| Shortcut | Action | Shortcut | Action | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ⌘T | New terminal | ⌘F | Search sessions | |
| ⇧⌘N | New group | ⌘B | Toggle sidebar | |
| ⌘W | Close tab | ⌘K | Clear screen | |
| ⌘R | Rename session | ⌘= / ⌘- / ⌘0 | Font size ± / reset | |
| ⌘, | Settings | ⌘C / ⌘V / ⌘A | Copy / paste / select all | |
| ⇧⌘R | Reveal cwd in Finder | ⌃↩ | Session context menu | |
| ⇧⌘S | Export session text | ⌘` | Last session |
Also: double-click the header to zoom the window, double-click a tab/group name to rename it, click a session's icon to set its color.
A two-crate Cargo workspace: tabt-core (the VT/ANSI engine — pure logic, zero dependencies, tests
on any platform) and tabt-app (the AppKit layer via objc2, macOS-only).
make test # tabt-core unit tests, then tabt-app's (themes.conf parser, layout.conf round trip)
make release # the shipping identity, dist/TabT.app
make dmg # package dist/TabT-<version>.dmg
make echo # standalone PTY echo loop, a debugging tool; run in a real terminal, not an IDE panel
make bloat # binary size audit (needs `cargo install cargo-bloat`)
make clean # remove build artifactsThree things to know before changing code:
tabt-appmust run as a.appbundle (make run) — a bare binary gets no focus or menu bar, which is normal macOS behavior for unbundled processes.- The release profile is size-tuned (
opt-level="z",lto,panic="abort",strip), so a panic anywhere kills the process — relevant to any code parsing PTY output or user input. objc2/objc2-foundation/objc2-app-kitare pinned to a matched set. If a type or method fails to resolve, checkcargo tree | grep objc2and theobjc2-app-kitfeature list intabt-app/Cargo.toml(one feature per Objective-C class).
CLAUDE.md is the long-form architecture guide.
MIT — see LICENSE.