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Terminal Setup
Cross renders its AI answers as styled, easy-to-read output — headings, bold, bullet lists, syntax-highlighted code, and clickable links — in any terminal that supports it. Tools like st-ask and st-verdict use this automatically. Everything still works in a plain terminal; you just get bare text and non-clickable URLs.
This is optional polish, not a requirement.
For the nicest experience on macOS — truecolor and clickable links — we recommend iTerm2:
brew install --cask iterm2Then open iTerm and run any Cross command as usual. Links in answers (e.g. wiki pages in a See also: block) become clickable.
The built-in macOS Terminal.app shows Cross output fine but does not make links clickable. iTerm2 does.
Clickable links and colour work out of the box in:
- iTerm2 (macOS)
- VS Code integrated terminal
- WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty
- Windows Terminal (Windows / WSL2 — see Windows / WSL2)
- GNOME Terminal, Konsole (Linux)
No configuration needed — Cross detects the terminal and renders accordingly.
Sometimes you want the raw markdown — to copy-paste, pipe, or save to a file. Cross keeps that easy:
| How | Result |
|---|---|
st-ask --no-render "…" / st-verdict --no-render …
|
Raw markdown for that run |
st-ask "…" | pbcopy (any pipe/redirect) |
Raw markdown automatically (rendering only applies to a live terminal) |
:raw / :render in the st-ask REPL |
Toggle rendering mid-session |
NO_COLOR=1 |
Disables rendering (the community-standard env var) |
CROSS_MARKDOWN=off in ~/.crossenv
|
Global kill-switch — never render, everywhere |
So piping and redirecting are already raw — you only need --no-render when you want raw output in an interactive terminal.
- st-ask — local help assistant (renders answers)
- st-verdict — verdict chart + AI analysis (renders the written analysis)
- Onboarding — first-time setup
- Windows / WSL2 — Windows Terminal setup