optionTerm

Sidebar-first GTK4 + libadwaita terminal with tiling splits, a command palette, and Adwaita preferences.

Features

• Tabs, three ways — top tab bar, left/right sidebar, or hidden tabs (window.tabs), each with a + button that doubles as a tab, split and terminal menu.
• Tab overview — F1 (or Super+Tab) opens a grid of live tab thumbnails to search and switch.
• Quick settings — the ··· menu opens with theme swatches, a font-size stepper showing the current zoom, and the live columns × rows of the focused pane.
• Categorized preferences — Appearance, Behavior, Sound, Shortcuts, Default Terminal and Advanced.
• Editable shortcuts — captured in the app and stored in keys.toml, separate from config.toml, with conflict detection and per-row reset.
• Configurable tab shape — tabs fill the bar or fit their title, and squeeze or scroll once they no longer fit.
• Scrolling, your way — optional scrollbar and jump-to-bottom button, and typing returns you to the prompt.
• Audible bell — rung on BEL, honoring your desktop's sound settings, with a test button.
• Default terminal — registers optionTerm through the portable xdg-terminals.list plus your desktop's own key.
• Tab handling — configurable position for new tabs, a middle-click action, and optional confirmation before closing a tab or a window.
• Keep the system awake while a command is running, so a long build is not interrupted by the screen locking.
• Accents & input methods — dead keys and compose sequences work (´ + a → á), plus CJK/IBus engines.
• Persistent settings — anything changed from the menus or Preferences is written straight back to config.toml.
• Clear & restart — wipe the screen and scrollback (Ctrl+Shift+K) or respawn the shell in place keeping the split layout (Ctrl+Shift+R).
• Clickable links — Ctrl+click or Shift+click opens hyperlinks, bare URLs and existing file paths.
• Scrollback search — Ctrl+Shift+F with wrap-around next/previous.
• Session restore — reopen tabs, nested split trees (orientation + divider ratios), working directories and window size on start (layout only).
• CLI launch — --working-directory / -d, -e / -- to run a command; second instances open a tab in the primary window.
• Translucent background — background_opacity, plus automatic config reload when config.toml changes.
• Kitty graphics — inline PNG/RGB/RGBA images, including the compressed, chunked full-pane frames emitted by terminal-browser.
• Tiling splits — split panes in any direction, directional focus, cycle focus, equalize, resize, and toggle zoom.
• Command palette — Ctrl+Shift+P to search every action and its shortcut, plus named [[command]] presets from config.
• Stylized cursor — block, bar, underline, or hollow block; blinking and custom colors.
• TOML configuration — ~/.option/terminal/config.toml, generated with defaults on first run.

Requirements

• Rust 1.90+
• GTK 4.14+, libadwaita 1.5+
• FoxTerminal VTE fork 0.84.1 (built by scripts/build-vte.sh)
• pkg-config, pango, cairo
• Git, Meson and Ninja (to build the pinned Kitty-capable VTE fork)

Arch / CachyOS

sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita vte4 pango cairo pkgconf git meson ninja

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libvte-2.91-gtk4-dev \
  libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev pkg-config git meson ninja-build

Build

./scripts/build-vte.sh
cargo build --release
./target/release/optionterm

Or use the helper scripts:

./scripts/run.sh
./scripts/install.sh           # ~/.local
./scripts/install.sh --system  # /usr/local (needs sudo)

Configuration

optionTerm reads ~/.option/terminal/config.toml. On the first run it is generated from built-in defaults (left sidebar for tabs).

[font]
family = "monospace"
size = 13
ligatures = true
use_system = false

[cursor]
style = "block"   # block | bar | underline | block_hollow
blink = true

[window]
tabs = "left"     # top | bottom | left | right | hidden
session_restore = true
inherit_working_directory = true
background_opacity = 1.0

[scroll]
lines = 10000

Shortcuts live in ~/.option/terminal/keys.toml (overrides only).

Named launch presets (optional):

[[command]]
name = "htop"
argv = ["htop"]

With session_restore = true, open tabs, nested split layout, each pane's working directory and the window size are written to ~/.option/terminal/session.toml on exit and restored on the next start.

CLI examples:

optionterm --working-directory ~/src
optionterm -e htop
optionterm -- vim README.md

Packaging

• AUR — optionterm (packaging/aur/); CI publishes on each GitHub Release
• .deb — ./packaging/deb/build-deb.sh after a release build
• AppImage — ./packaging/appimage/build-appimage.sh (prefer Ubuntu 24.04 hosts)

NOTICE documents the bundled LGPL VTE fork and credits its Kitty graphics implementation to FoxTerminal creator yacha.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.