A terminal built for the AI era — seamlessly integrated with AI, built entirely by AI.
Analyze logs, get instant explanations, ask questions — all without leaving the terminal. pterm integrates with Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini so that AI assistance is always one right-click away.
Select any output — error logs, stack traces, command results — and let AI break it down instantly. Right-click, summarize, done.
Open a chat dialog and AI sees everything: your working directory, running process, and recent output. No copy-pasting into a separate window. Multi-turn conversation, right where you work.
Paste or drop an image and pterm saves it to a managed store, inserting the file path inline — ready for AI tools that accept file references. Hover over the path to see a floating preview.
- Claude Code, Codex, Gemini — choose your model in Settings > AI
- Responses in 40 languages matching your macOS language
- All processing runs through your locally installed CLI — no data leaves your machine through pterm
Hook into terminal I/O streams and pipe data to external processes in real time. Designed for TUI-based AI tools like Claude Code — capture responses for text-to-speech, completion detection, or audit logging without interfering with the terminal.
Three buffering modes for different use cases:
- immediate — raw PTY bytes for custom parsers and byte-level analysis
- line — clean text, line by line, for log files and grep
- idle — screen snapshots on output pause with LCS-based line diff — sends only changed lines, eliminating TUI redraw noise
Example: Read AI responses aloud. Configure an idle-mode hook matching claude, connect it to a TTS engine, and pterm streams only new response content — no duplicates from screen redraws, no prompt noise. Each chunk is NUL-delimited for easy parsing in shell scripts (read -d '').
Zero overhead when disabled — the PTY read path is identical to a build without the hook feature.
Built-in Model Context Protocol server with 20+ tools. AI agents can list, read, and control terminals programmatically — enabling fully autonomous workflows.
See all running terminals at a glance in the overview grid. Click to focus, Shift-select to split. No more window juggling.
- Overview grid — every session, live-updating, in a single view
- Split view — Shift-click to select multiple terminals and work side by side
- Auto-cleanup — terminals disappear on exit. Close button to stop a process and remove it
pterm caps scrollback automatically — run tail -F for hours and memory stays flat. No bloat, no slowdown, no OOM surprises.
Native input method support for Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and other CJK languages. Inline composition, candidate windows, and cursor positioning all work correctly — even in split view.
Metal-accelerated rendering. Apple Silicon optimizations. Zero external dependencies. Built to handle high-volume output without dropping frames.
All benchmarks on Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max (2021, 16-inch), 64 GB RAM, macOS 26 Tahoe.
Throughput — kitten Benchmark
kitten __benchmark__ --render --repetitions 100| Terminal | ASCII | Unicode | CSI codes | Long escapes | Images | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pterm (0.3.2) | 🥇 126.0 MB/s | 🥇 143.1 MB/s | 🥇 114.8 MB/s | 🥇 527.4 MB/s | 🥇 354.2 MB/s | 🥇 253.1 MB/s |
| kitty (0.46.0) | 89.9 MB/s | 🥉 123.1 MB/s | 🥉 56.2 MB/s | 🥈 270.6 MB/s | 243.8 MB/s | 🥉 156.7 MB/s |
| Alacritty (0.16.1) | 🥈 113.2 MB/s | 🥈 142.2 MB/s | 🥈 72.1 MB/s | 171.1 MB/s | 🥈 315.1 MB/s | 🥈 162.7 MB/s |
| Ghostty (1.3.1) | 🥉 86.7 MB/s | 99.9 MB/s | 38.2 MB/s | 68.7 MB/s | 52.3 MB/s | 69.2 MB/s |
| WezTerm (20240203-110809-5046fc22) | 25.5 MB/s | 38.4 MB/s | 17.9 MB/s | 🥉 238.9 MB/s | 🥉 295.1 MB/s | 123.2 MB/s |
| macOS Terminal (2.15) | 27.5 MB/s | 41.1 MB/s | 30.4 MB/s | 93.5 MB/s | 62.3 MB/s | 50.9 MB/s |
| iTerm2 (3.6.9) | 11.6 MB/s | 6.6 MB/s | 1.4 MB/s | 22.5 MB/s | 9.8 MB/s | 10.4 MB/s |
| Terminal | Time |
|---|---|
| pterm (0.3.2) | 🥇 0.799s |
| WezTerm (20240203-110809-5046fc22) | 🥈 0.839s |
| kitty (0.46.0) | 🥉 0.886s |
| Alacritty (0.16.1) | 1.016s |
| Ghostty (1.3.1) | 1.021s |
| macOS Terminal (2.15) | 1.158s |
| iTerm2 (3.6.9) | 1.212s |
Watch the benchmark video on YouTube
Cmd+F with match highlighting, VS Code-style scrollbar minimap, and circular navigation. Find what you need in thousands of lines of output instantly.
Full VT escape sequence support — synchronized updates, double-width/height lines, grapheme clusters, color emoji, inline images, ANSI/256/truecolor. Drop-in replacement for your current terminal.
--cli— headless bridging for scripting and automation--command— launch a transient terminal that runs a single command--user-data-dir— isolated profiles for separate environments
Zero third-party dependencies. Every line of code is auditable. Code signed and notarized by Apple.
- macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later
Download the latest pterm-darwin-arm64.zip from Releases, unzip, and move pterm.app to /Applications.
100% AI-coded. Not a single line was written by hand. Every feature, every optimization, every Metal shader — generated entirely by Claude Code and Codex. A terminal built by AI, for the AI era — pushing beyond what manual engineering can achieve.