A full-featured, native terminal emulator written in Nitpick

Nitty is a modern, native terminal emulator built from scratch in the Nitpick programming language. It delivers feature parity with tools like Tabby while using a native GTK4 GUI instead of Electron — resulting in fast startup, low memory usage, and a truly native desktop experience.

Nitty is both a serious, production-grade terminal and a showcase for the Nitpick language ecosystem, demonstrating that complex desktop applications can be built entirely in Nitpick.

Status: Release Candidate (v0.15.0) — All core features complete. See Known Issues and CHANGELOG.

• Full VT100/VT220/xterm/xterm-256color escape sequence support
• 24-bit true color (16.7M colors) and 256-color rendering
• GPU-accelerated text rendering via GTK4/Cairo
• Unicode, emoji, and Powerline/Nerd Font glyph support
• Configurable scrollback buffer with live search
• Bracketed paste, copy-on-select, multi-line paste warnings
• Bell: audible, visual, and desktop notification modes

• Tabbed terminal sessions with activity notifications
• Horizontal and vertical split panes with BSP tree layout
• Broadcast input to multiple panes simultaneously
• Quake-mode drop-down terminal (global hotkey: F12)

• YAML-based config (~/.config/nitty/config.yaml) with hot-reload
• Graphical Settings editor (Ctrl+Shift+,)
• Per-connection-type profiles with full TOML serialization
• Fully customizable hotkeys with multi-chord support
• 150+ built-in color themes

• Extensible via the Plugin API with defined extension points
• Plugin Manager (Ctrl+Shift+P) — install plugins from a local directory, configure per-plugin settings, enable/disable, and uninstall with full directory cleanup
• Plugin scaffolding script (scripts/new-plugin.sh) for creating new plugins
• See the Plugin Development Guide to get started

Split panes with local shell and SSH session	Connection Manager with grouped profiles
Settings dialog — Appearance panel	Serial connection in hexdump mode

Download the latest release from the Releases page.

Ubuntu / Debian:

# Download nitty_<version>_amd64.deb from the Releases page, then:
sudo dpkg -i nitty_*_amd64.deb

Fedora / RHEL:

# Download nitty-<version>-1.x86_64.rpm from the Releases page, then:
sudo rpm -i nitty-*.x86_64.rpm

AppImage (any Linux distro):

# Download Nitty-<version>-x86_64.AppImage from the Releases page, then:
chmod +x Nitty-*-x86_64.AppImage
./Nitty-*-x86_64.AppImage

Flatpak:

# Download Nitty.flatpak from the Releases page, then:
flatpak install --user Nitty.flatpak
flatpak run com.nitty.Terminal

• Nitpick compiler (npkc) v0.52.15 or later
• Nitpick build system (npkbld)
• LLVM 20
• GTK4 development headers (libgtk-4-dev)
• libssh2 development headers (libssh2-1-dev)

git clone https://github.com/alternative-intelligence-cp/nitty.git
cd nitty

# Build C shims
make -C shim/gtk4/
make -C shim/libssh2/
make -C shim/pty/
make -C shim/serial/
make -C shim/telnet/

# Build Nitty
npkbld build

# Run
./build/nitty

npkbld test tests/
bash tests/e2e/run_e2e.sh

On first launch, Nitty creates ~/.config/nitty/config.yaml with sensible defaults. Open the graphical settings editor with Ctrl+Shift+,, or edit the file directly — it hot-reloads on save.

Key configuration sections:

• [terminal] — scrollback, bell, cursor style
• [appearance] — theme, font, opacity
• [hotkeys] — override any keybinding
• [quake] — drop-down mode settings

See KNOWN_ISSUES.md for a full list of tracked limitations.

Nitty is developed by the Alternative Intelligence CP team. Contributions are welcome.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — see the LICENSE file for details.

• Tabby by Eugene Pankov — Feature reference and inspiration
• Nitpick — The programming language that makes this possible