A minimal, always-on-top terminal that gets out of your way.

Built for running AI CLIs — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini — without a heavyweight terminal app hogging your screen.

---

What it does

Ghost is a dark, frameless terminal panel with three states:

State	What you see
Mini	A tiny black box pinned to a screen edge with the Ghost icon. A dot pulses while output streams. Always on top.
Quick view	A compact terminal that opens right beside the mini box when you click it.
Full view	A large centered terminal for real sessions — one click on the expand button in the top bar.

Move your mouse away and stop typing and it melts back into the mini box (never within the first 5 seconds of opening). Click the box and it's back, exactly where you left it. Pin it when you want it to stay put.

Features

• 🖥️ Real terminals — native PTY per tab (login shell, your full PATH), xterm.js with WebGL rendering, 24-bit color, Unicode 11, clickable links
• 🗂️ Tabs — ⌘T new, ⌘W close, ⌘1–9 switch, right-click to rename or color-tag (the color tints that tab's terminal theme), auto-titles from the shell, activity dots on busy background tabs
• 💾 Tabs persist — your tab set, custom names, and colors survive restarts (fresh shells each launch)
• ⚡ Quick commands — ⌘K palette with your AI CLIs (claude, codex, gemini by default, fully editable). Click to run; ⌘-click to run in a new tab
• 🖼️ Drag & drop — drop images, files, or folders onto the terminal and the shell-quoted path lands at your cursor (ideal for handing screenshots to Claude Code)
• 📌 Mini mode — draggable to any screen edge, snaps and remembers its spot, pulses while output streams. Click it to open the quick view anchored right at the icon
• ⚙️ Settings — a clean centered modal: auto-hide toggle and delay, always-on-top, font size, quick-command editor. Everything persists
• 🔄 Auto-updates — signed and notarized builds; Settings → Check for updates downloads, installs, and restarts in place
• 🌘 Dark, minimal design — no title bar, rounded transparent window, 100 ms fade/scale animations

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌘T	New tab
⌘W	Close tab
⌘1–9	Switch tab
⌘K	Quick command palette
⌘,	Settings
⌘+ / ⌘−	Font size
⌘C / ⌘V	Copy selection / paste
Right-click tab	Rename · tab color
Esc	Close palette / settings

Install

Grab the latest signed .dmg from Releases (Apple Silicon). Ghost keeps itself current via Settings → Check for updates.

Building from source

Prereqs: Rust (stable), Node 18+, and the Tauri prerequisites for your OS.

git clone https://github.com/WynterJones/GhostTerminal.git
cd GhostTerminal
npm install
npm run tauri dev      # develop
npm run tauri build    # produce the .app / installer

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Frontend (vanilla TS + Vite)               │
│  xterm.js (WebGL) · tabs · palette ·        │
│  window-state machine · settings            │
└──────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
               │ Tauri IPC — raw-byte channels
┌──────────────┴──────────────────────────────┐
│  Rust (Tauri 2)                             │
│  portable-pty → login shell per tab         │
│  spawn / write / resize / kill              │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

PTY output streams to the frontend as raw bytes over Tauri IPC channels (no JSON encoding per chunk); xterm.js consumes Uint8Array directly and handles UTF-8 chunk boundaries itself.

Roadmap

• Global summon hotkey
• Scrollback restore across restarts
• Windows / Linux polish

See _PLANS/PRD.md for the full product doc.

License

MIT © Wynter Jones