Termarc

A native terminal workspace built with:

• Tauri 2
• Vue 3
• xterm.js 6 with its WebGL2 renderer
• portable-pty in Rust

The Rust backend owns each shell process and PTY. The frontend supports multiple independent terminal tabs, receives their byte chunks over raw binary Tauri channels, and writes them directly to the matching xterm.js instance.

Requirements

• Node.js 20+
• Rust
• Tauri's platform prerequisites

On macOS, Xcode Command Line Tools are sufficient.

Run

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Build

npm run tauri build

On macOS, the application bundle is written to src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/Termarc.app.

To build only the web frontend, run npm run build.

CLI

Termarc's app executable also provides a lightweight macOS CLI for launching the app and managing the local project registry. Add a symlink from App settings, or install it into ~/.local/bin (or set TERMARC_BIN_DIR):

npm run cli:install

This symlinks the executable inside /Applications/Termarc.app as termarc. Add that directory to your PATH, then use:

termarc --help
termarc launch
termarc projects list
termarc projects create "Termarc" ~/Development/termarc

Use --json with list/status commands for machine-readable output.

Custom themes

Create ~/.config/termarc/themes and copy theme.json into that directory. Its lowercase filename (for example, my-theme.json) becomes the theme ID. Edit the label, colorScheme (light or dark), and color tokens; every token is required. The surface colors progress from surface-base through surface-raised, surface-active, and surface-emphasis to distinguish nested and interactive UI layers. Restart Termarc after saving the file, then select the theme in App settings. Invalid theme files are ignored, and custom theme IDs cannot replace the built-in themes.

Formatting

npm run format:check
npm run format

Architecture

shell process ↔ portable-pty ↔ Rust commands/channel ↔ xterm.js ↔ WebGL2

PTY input is sent through Tauri commands. Output is streamed through a raw binary Tauri channel. ResizeObserver and FitAddon keep the kernel PTY size synchronized with the visible terminal grid.

Use the sidebar + button to open another terminal and × to close one. The keyboard shortcuts are Cmd+T / Cmd+W on macOS and Ctrl+Shift+T / Ctrl+Shift+W elsewhere. The toolbar buttons can collapse either sidebar.

The Git changes sidebar refreshes every two seconds and displays git diff HEAD for the active terminal shell's current working directory with the @git-diff-view/vue unified diff renderer. On macOS and Linux, Termarc resolves that directory from the shell process; other platforms fall back to Termarc's launch directory.

The frontend includes a focused xterm.js 6.0 compatibility shim that encodes Shift+Enter as Kitty keyboard sequence CSI 13;2u, allowing Pi to distinguish it from plain Enter. This can be removed once Kitty keyboard support reaches a stable xterm.js release.