Zinc

简体中文 | English

Zinc is a lightweight multi-shell Windows terminal launcher built with Electron, React, xterm.js, and node-pty. It puts PowerShell 7 first, keeps a modern compact UI (vertical tab rail, Acrylic-style window, practical settings), and stays low-overhead so you can open the shells already installed on your machine.

The active application is in app/. The archive retains only isolated historical feasibility experiments; it is not a second product implementation.

Highlights

• Vertical terminal tabs with create, rename, duplicate, and close flows.
• Auto-detected shells — PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt, Git Bash, and installed WSL distributions — backed by ConPTY through node-pty and xterm.js, with a per-tab shell picker and a configurable default.
• Acrylic-style frameless Windows UI with light/dark and accent-aware settings.
• Configurable fonts, colors, opacity, shortcuts, zoom, scrollback, and session restore.
• Clipboard image paste, clickable web links, and new or duplicated tabs that try to inherit the current working directory; later shell directory changes may not be reflected.
• Per-user Windows NSIS setup and an optional GitHub Releases update flow.
• English and Simplified Chinese interface resources.

Zinc intentionally does not provide cloud sync, accounts, a plugin platform, pane splitting, or built-in SSH profile management.

Requirements

• Zinc 0.6.1 supports Windows only: Windows 10 or Windows 11, x64. No other platform is planned.
• PowerShell 7 is the recommended default shell. When it is not installed, Zinc automatically falls back to Windows PowerShell or Command Prompt.
• Git Bash and WSL are optional shells: they appear only when you have already installed them yourself.
• A normal per-user installation does not require Zinc to run as administrator, and does not require a separate Node.js installation.

Install

Download Zinc-<version>-Setup.exe (the NSIS installer) from the repository's GitHub Releases page. That is the only Windows installer Zinc ships.

Zinc is not code-signed, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen will block the first run. Download SHA256SUMS.txt from the same release, run Get-FileHash .\Zinc-<version>-Setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256 in your download folder, and compare it against the line for that exact filename. Run the file only if the values match; delete it if they do not.

Development

Install Node.js 22.12 or newer, then run the following commands in PowerShell:

cd app
npm ci
npm run typecheck
npm run build
npm run dev

Windows packaging is also run from app/:

npm run dist

See Contributing, Architecture, and Troubleshooting before making larger changes.

Privacy and Security

Zinc has no built-in analytics or advertising telemetry. Settings, restored session metadata, and pasted clipboard images are stored locally. Terminal commands and child processes can still access the network, and checking for updates contacts GitHub Releases. Read Privacy for the complete data boundary and Security before reporting a vulnerability.

Never attach unredacted terminal screenshots, logs, configuration files, or session state to a public issue. They can contain usernames, paths, commands, tokens, hostnames, and working directories.

Documentation

• Architecture
• Installer behavior
• Release process
• Troubleshooting
• Support
• Third-party notices
• Changelog

License

Zinc is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 only. Third-party components remain under their respective licenses; see Third-party notices.