Why choose teru over other terminal emulators?

teru is the only terminal with native AI agent protocol support, built-in process graph tracking, and Claude Code integration. At 1.6MB with no GPU requirement, it works in environments where GPU-accelerated terminals fail.

What can teru do that other terminals cannot?

AI agent protocol (OSC 9999 + CustomPaneBackend), process graph with agent metadata, MCP server with 19 tools for cross-agent communication, and 20-50x scrollback compression. No other terminal has these features.

Why teru — what makes it different

What only teru has

AI agent protocol

The only terminal with native Claude Code integration. CustomPaneBackend receives spawn commands directly — no tmux adapter. OSC 9999 lets any process self-declare as an agent with name, group, status, and progress.

Unique to teru

Process graph

Every process tracked in a DAG with parent-child relationships and agent metadata. Query it via MCP, watch status in pane borders, correlate tool calls to output lines. Millisecond lookups.

Unique to teru

Cross-agent messaging

Multiple Claude Code instances connect to teru's MCP server and query each other's terminal state — read output, send input, broadcast to workspaces. Zero configuration.

Unique to teru

1.6MB binary

No FreeType, no fontconfig, no OpenGL, no GTK. Three runtime dependencies and two vendored C files. Most terminals are 6–80MB. teru is 1.6MB.

No GPU required

CPU SIMD rendering via @Vector. Works in VMs, containers, SSH sessions, cheap VPS instances with no GPU. Same binary, same performance everywhere. Frame times under 50μs.

20–50x scrollback compression

Command-stream compression (keyframe/delta encoding). A 50,000-line scrollback costs ~5MB instead of ~150MB. Never lose terminal history to memory limits.

Architecture decisions

One binary, one process

Terminal emulator + multiplexer + tiling manager in the same event loop. No separate tmux server, no IPC overhead, no config translation layer. The renderer and multiplexer share state directly.

CPU over GPU

For terminal rendering — text on a character grid — the GPU is idle 99.9% of the time. SIMD blitting on CPU is faster for this workload and eliminates an entire class of driver compatibility issues.

Zig over Rust

Comptime for platform selection (-Dx11=false). Inline tests adjacent to implementation. @Vector for portable SIMD. Simple build system without a separate DSL.

Compressed scrollback over ring buffers

Traditional terminals store expanded character cells. teru stores the raw VT byte stream with keyframe/delta compression — 20–50x better memory efficiency for the same history depth.

Current limitations

teru is v0.1.x — it works as a daily driver but has gaps:

No full Unicode: emoji and CJK characters not yet supported (planned v0.3.0)
No detach/attach daemon mode: sessions don't survive terminal restarts (planned v0.2.0)
Linux only: macOS and Windows platform stubs compile but are not functional
Wayland keyboard: currently raw passthrough; proper keymap integration in progress (v0.1.4)
No shell integration scripts: OSC 133 works but bash/zsh/fish injection is manual (v0.1.5)