GitHub - d0x2a/mTerm: mTerm is now Kuddo: github.com/d0x2a/kuddo. Archived with mTerm's history and releases up to 1.6.0, the last with an Intel build.

mTerm

A native macOS terminal emulator. Opinionated, GPU-accelerated, focused.

mTerm is now Kuddo. This repository is archived: it keeps mTerm's history and its releases up to 1.6.0. Kuddo 1.0.0 picked up where mTerm 1.6.0 left off, and new releases, issues and the Homebrew cask (brew install --cask d0x2a/tap/kuddo) are there. On Apple silicon, a Homebrew install of mTerm moves to Kuddo on the next brew upgrade. Kuddo is built for Apple silicon only, so mTerm 1.6.0 remains the release for Intel Macs.

_{scripts/rendercheck.sh — bold, italic, underline, faint and inverse, truecolor, the 256-colour palette, emoji, double-width CJK and combining marks, all in one screen.}

Status: v1.6.0. Every line of the definition of done in SPEC.md has shipped, including tmux -CC control mode, profiles, triggers and settings search, and ⌘K now searches every tab and command in one list. Two of the performance targets have been measured rather than asserted: scrollback memory is met with room to spare, throughput is well short of the figure the spec aspired to. Both numbers, and the harness that produced them, are in docs/BENCHMARKS.md.

Why

mTerm is an alternative to iTerm2 for developers who want:

• A terminal that feels like a real Mac app, not a port.
• GPU-class rendering (Ghostty/Alacritty territory).
• A small, sharp feature set instead of a thousand preferences.

It is not trying to be Warp. No AI features, no cloud accounts, and nothing that rethinks the shell — ⌘K navigates mTerm's own tabs and commands and never touches what you type at the prompt. Just a fast, beautiful, modern terminal.

Install

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install --cask d0x2a/tap/mterm

Signed DMG

Grab the latest .dmg from Releases, drag mTerm.app to /Applications. The DMG is a universal binary, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper will accept it on first launch.

Build from source

Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 15+ (or just the command-line tools with Swift 5.10+).

git clone https://github.com/d0x2a/mTerm.git
cd mTerm
swift run -c release mTerm

What works today

• AppKit-native window with tabbed sidebar (drag to reorder), full-screen, session restore (tabs, their directories and their profiles). The sidebar and split divider tint to the active theme.
• ⌘K opens a hub over every tab in every window and every command on the menu bar, ranked in one list. A tab row shows its index, run state, title, directory and foreground process, because three tabs called "mTerm" is the common case and the title alone never identifies one. Sections lead with their best match, so the first row is always the best answer to ⏎. An empty query lists recent tabs with the previous one selected, making ⌘K ⏎ a flip back; ⌘⌫ closes the highlighted tab without leaving. Actions carry the words you'd arrive with rather than only their menu titles — "cls" finds Clear Screen, "blurry" finds Stroke weight and opens Settings with the focus ring on it.
• Metal-rendered terminal view with pixel-snapped glyph atlas — crisp text at all sizes, no GPU filtering blur.
• Bold and italic draw in the font's own faces, not a synthesised slant or smear, and the advance is identical across all four so the columns never drift. Underline, faint and inverse too, including the codes that turn each of them back off.
• Resizing reflows the buffer: wrapped lines rejoin and re-split at the new width rather than being cut off, and the grid size shows in a readout while you drag.
• xterm-256color compatibility for vim/neovim/htop/fzf/less/git pagers. 24-bit true color, alt-screen, scroll regions (DECSTBM), DEC line drawing, and synchronized output (DEC 2026) so multi-line redraws land in one frame.
• Mouse reporting: SGR (1006) and legacy encodings for click, drag, motion, and wheel — hold ⇧ to select instead. Bracketed paste, focus events, and device/cursor-position reports.
• East Asian and fullwidth characters take their proper two columns, and combining marks compose into the glyph they follow, so CJK text stays in step with the shell's own cursor arithmetic.
• Scrollback search: plain text by default, regex via ⌥⌘F, smart-case.
• Shell integration for zsh, bash and fish via OSC 133: gutter prompt markers (color-coded by exit status), jump to previous/next prompt with ⌘↑ / ⌘↓. Nothing is written to your own rc files — each shell gets a wrapper slipped in front of them (ZDOTDIR for zsh, --rcfile for bash, a vendor_conf.d snippet for fish), and it sources your real startup files before layering the hooks on top.
• Themes: Tomorrow Night, Solarized (light + dark), Nord, Dracula, Gruvbox Dark, plus mTerm's own light + dark. Import any iTerm2 .itermcolors file. Auto light/dark switching follows the system appearance.
• macOS notifications for terminal attention events (bell, OSC 9 / OSC 777) — configurable in Settings.
• ⌘-click opens links: URLs (with or without a scheme — code.d0x2a.com and localhost:3000/health both count) go to the browser, file paths are revealed in Finder. Links aren't drawn differently from the text around them until you point at one: with ⌘ held, the link under the pointer takes the theme's accent colour with an underline to match, and the cursor becomes a hand, one link at a time rather than the whole screen at once. Only paths that exist on disk are offered, so and/or stays inert, a file.swift:42 from compiler output links whole, and a URL that wraps across rows is treated as one address rather than two fragments.
• ⌘-click copies text set apart by colour — inline code or a quoted draft in Claude Code's output, a blue name in ls. The run is every neighbouring cell in the same colour, so it starts and stops mid-line; with ⌘ held it tints under the pointer, and ⌘-click asks before copying, showing the text and its character count. A coloured paragraph the program word-wrapped itself copies as one line, but a column of short same-coloured lines stays one line each. Links win where they match.
• tmux control mode: run tmux -CC and each tmux window becomes a real mTerm tab — ⌘T makes a tmux window, ⌘W closes one, renames and window switches follow tmux both ways. A tab shows its window's active pane and follows tmux when you move between panes; mTerm has no splits, and in control mode tmux sends each pane separately rather than a composited screen. One session at a time, and detaching ends the tabs rather than reattaching.
• Close-confirmation when a foreground process is running (vim, ssh, etc.) — togglable in Settings.
• Clear Screen (⇧⌘K) asks first, because it discards the scrollback along with the screen and sits one key away from the ⌘K hub. Togglable in Settings.
• Font family, size, stroke weight, and line spacing (1.0×–2.0×, default 1.15×) are all adjustable live in Settings.
• Frames can be presented without waiting for the display's refresh (Appearance > Rendering > Sync frames to the display, on by default): a few milliseconds off a keystroke's echo, at the risk of a torn frame.
• Triggers: a regex plus what to do with what it matches — highlight it, recolour it, underline it, or make ⌘-click open it as a URL, reveal it in Finder, or run a command with $1 as the match. Edited in Settings with an inline tester that runs the real regex, and stored in triggers.json. Your rules are tried before the two built-in ones (URLs and file paths), which can be switched off but not edited — their patterns are maintained in mTerm and improve between releases.
• Profiles: a named command, starting directory, environment and optional pinned theme, edited in Settings and stored one JSON file each under profiles/ so a profile can be shared or checked into a repo. Open one from File > New Tab with Profile or ⌘⌥1–9; ⌘T uses whichever is marked default. A profile that pins a theme keeps it whatever the system appearance does, so a production-ssh tab can look different from the rest.
• Settings window organized into Appearance / Profiles / Triggers / General / Notifications panes, with a search field over the sidebar that finds a control by what it's called or by what you'd call it — "antialiasing" finds stroke weight, "history" finds the scrollback depth — and takes you to it with the focus ring on it.
• Shell integration can be switched off in Settings, and the scrollback depth picked there too (1k–100k lines; the pane shows what each costs per tab).

Keyboard shortcuts

Configuration

mTerm stores everything under ~/Library/Application Support/mTerm/:

• settings.json — appearance mode, themes, font, close-warning preference.
• state.json — restored on next launch (tabs, their directories and profiles, window frame, full-screen state).
• profiles/*.json — one file per profile (name, command, directory, environment).
• triggers.json — your own trigger rules, plus any built-in ones you've switched off.

There's no config file in v1; everything is editable through the Settings window (⌘,).

Architecture

See SPEC.md for the full design — stack choices, terminal-emulation scope, performance budgets, and what's deliberately out of scope.

AppKit shell  →  MainWindowController + SidebarView
                    │
                    └─ N tabs, one Session each
                            │
                            ├─ PTY (forkpty + posix_spawn, off-main I/O)
                            ├─ VT parser  →  TerminalState
                            └─ Metal Renderer (glyph atlas, instanced cells)

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright © 2026 Dox2A Labs LLC.