⚡ JeTTY

A blazing-fast, GPU-accelerated terminal that summons to the center of your screen — or drops down Yakuake-style — on a global hotkey.

JeTTY — a terminal (TTY) that moves like a Jet. Raw speed is its first priority, above everything else.

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🤝 JeTTY is young and looking for collaborators! If you love terminals, Rust, or GPU rendering, come help shape a fast, beautiful terminal — see Collaborators wanted.

Contents

• Features
• Screenshots
• Install
• Keybindings
• Performance
• Architecture
• Collaborators wanted
• Roadmap
• License

✨ Features

• 🚀 Blazing fast — GPU-rendered with wgpu; ~5.5 ms full-screen frames (144 Hz-ready), ~0 % CPU when idle (damage-driven redraw), 150+ MB/s VT throughput. See the performance budget.
• 🎯 Global summon hotkey — press F9 anywhere to bring JeTTY up. Three modes (switchable in settings):
  • Center — drops into the middle of your screen.
  • Dropdown — slides down from the top edge, full screen width, Yakuake/Guake style, with adjustable width & height.
  • Fullscreen — covers the whole monitor it is on (borderless, no display-mode change), with the rounded corners squared off so no desktop shows through at the screen edges. F11 toggles fullscreen on the focused terminal window — the main one or a detached one — without changing the mode; it is a view toggle, so in Fullscreen mode the next summon puts you back. Like every other shortcut, F11 is swallowed while an overlay owns the keyboard (command palette, search, hint/copy-mode, a confirmation, inline rename), and the Settings window only listens for Esc. Note that if your window manager fullscreens JeTTY behind our back (its own shortcut or window menu), JeTTY does not hear about it — winit reports no such event — so its idea of the shape can go stale until you press F11 twice.
• ✨ Summon effects — five self-written GPU reveal shaders, selectable in settings: Phosphor Ignition (default — CRT power-on), Bayer Crystallize, Liquid Drop, Focus Pull, or None.
• 📺 Visual effects — an optional CRT mode (curvature, scanlines, shadow-mask, bloom, chromatic aberration, vignette + animated roll/flicker/jitter) and a caret flash/glow, all under a dedicated Effects settings tab. Off by default, so the default look and ~0% idle CPU are untouched.
• 🗂️ Tabs — Ctrl+Shift+T new (opens in the current tab's directory), Ctrl+Shift+W close (with confirm), Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+1‒9 switch, double-click to rename, right-click for a Detach / Rename / Close menu. Tabs auto-title from the shell (OSC 0/2 — a manual rename always wins), and inactive tabs show an activity / bell dot.
• 🔎 Scrollback search — Ctrl+Shift+F: incremental, case-insensitive, every visible match highlighted, Enter/F3 / Shift+F3 to jump older/newer, live 3/17 counter.
• 🔗 Clickable links — hold Ctrl (also ⌘ on macOS) to underline the URL under the pointer, Ctrl+click opens it in your browser — plain-text URLs and OSC 8 hyperlinks.
• 🧭 Shell integration (OSC 133) — opt in with eval "$(jetty --print-shell-integration zsh)" and JeTTY marks failed commands with a themed bar and jumps between prompts with Ctrl+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Shift+X. Never edits your dotfiles; powerlevel10k-aware (POWERLEVEL9K_TERM_SHELL_INTEGRATION=true).
• 🔔 Run & Notify — kick off a long build, summon JeTTY away, and it pings you when the command finishes (desktop notification naming the tab + exit code + duration + last output line, plus a taskbar/dock urgency hint) — only when you're not already watching. Optional auto-summon on finish. The summon terminal's superpower.
• 📋 OSC 52 clipboard — copy from inside ssh / tmux / nvim straight to your local system clipboard (write by default; remote paste is opt-in for safety).
• 🎨 Bring your own theme — drop a ~/.config/jetty/themes/*.toml palette and it appears in the picker (and can shadow a built-in). Plus the 22 built-ins.
• ♻️ Config hot-reload — edit ~/.config/jetty/config.toml (or a theme file) and JeTTY applies it live, no restart — never clobbering your file.
• ⌘ Command palette — Ctrl+Shift+P (⌘⇧P on macOS) opens a fuzzy, keyboard-first launcher: type to filter every action (new tab, switch theme, toggle effects, jump to prompt, settings…), Enter runs it. The fast way to do anything.
• 🖼️ Inline images (Sixel + Kitty) — programs that emit Sixel (img2sixel, chafa -f sixel, matplotlib's sixel backend, lsix) or speak the Kitty graphics protocol (chafa -f kitty, timg -p kitty, kitten icat --transfer-mode=stream) render a real bitmap right in the grid, GPU-textured, at native size, scrolling with your scrollback. Image previews and plots without leaving the terminal.
• ⌨️ Remappable keybindings — a [keys] table in your config remaps any shortcut (copy, tabs, search, palette, font…) to your muscle memory; unset keys keep the sensible defaults, and it hot-reloads live. Terminal control bytes (Ctrl+C…) are protected. Setting an action to "" unbinds it and hands the key back to the shell — e.g. [keys] toggle_fullscreen = "" gives bare F11 back to your TUI (it then sends \e[23~ again); Shift/Ctrl/Alt+F11 reach the shell either way.
• 🔤 Hint mode & copy-mode — Ctrl+Shift+H labels every URL / path / git-hash / IP on screen so you can copy it with a keystroke (Alt to open a URL); Ctrl+Shift+Space enters a vi-style keyboard copy-mode (hjkl / word motions, v/V to select, y to yank) — select and copy without ever touching the mouse.
• 🪟➡️ Detachable tabs — Ctrl+Shift+D, the tab's right-click menu, or simply dragging a tab off the bar pops it into its own window (with its own title bar and status strip); reattach with Ctrl+Shift+D, the window's right-click menu, closing it, or dropping it back onto the main tab bar. Detached windows have full mouse parity: selection, wheel, scrollbar, middle-click paste.
• 🎨 22 built-in themes — Catppuccin (Mocha/Macchiato), Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Dracula, Onyx, Nord, Solarized (dark/light), One Dark, Monokai (+Pro), Everforest, Rosé Pine, Kanagawa, Material, Ayu (dark/mirage), Tomorrow Night, Oceanic Next, GitHub Dark, Palenight — exact community palettes, picked from a scrollable dropdown with live color previews. Every UI surface re-skins with the active theme.
• 🪟 Custom-decorated window — borderless client-side decorations, our own title bar, rounded corners (radius slider), runtime opacity.
• 🔤 Live font control — change font size (Ctrl + +/-/0) and family (any installed monospace) at runtime, no restart.
• 📋 Selection & clipboard — drag to select (auto-copies), Shift+drag to select even inside mouse-aware TUIs (vim/htop/tmux/Claude Code), right-click Copy / Paste / Select All menu, Ctrl+Shift+C/V, middle-click paste, bracketed-paste aware.
• ⚙️ Settings dialog — Ctrl+Shift+P opens a movable dialog (theme, opacity, corner radius, summon effect, window mode, dropdown size, tab-bar position, scrollback size, shell, focus auto-hide, welcome splash, performance HUD, font) — all persisted to ~/.config/jetty/config.toml.
• 📊 Live performance HUD — an optional tab-bar overlay showing frame ms · fps · CPU% · VT MB/s in real time, and an honest "idle" state when the app settles (never forces a redraw — idle stays ~0% CPU). Toggle with show_perf_hud.
• 👋 Welcome overlay — a neofetch-style splash on first launch (accent ASCII logo + version/backend), dismissed on the first key/click/Esc. Toggle with show_welcome.
• 🖥️ Desktop-independent — X11 and Wayland, KDE / GNOME / any compositor, every distro. No DE-specific code, no compositor libraries.
• 🅱️ Full text attributes — bold, italic, and every underline style: single, double, dotted, dashed, and undercurl (with per-run colors, so nvim/LSP diagnostics render their red squiggles), plus strikethrough. Monospace alignment is preserved (glyph advances snap to the cell grid). Cursor shape follows the shell: block / beam / underline (DECSCUSR), hollow when unfocused.
• ✅ A real terminal — true-color, answers host queries (DSR/DA), proper TERM, window resize with grid reflow, configurable scrollback (1k–100k lines), Ctrl+D closes cleanly.

📸 Screenshots

Catppuccin Mocha	Tokyo Night
Gruvbox Dark	Dracula
Onyx	Settings — 22 themes, live previews

CRT effect (curvature · scanlines · bloom · vignette)	Summon effect (Phosphor Ignition)

Live perf HUD

🚀 Install

JeTTY runs on Linux (X11 / Wayland, Vulkan) and macOS (Metal). Building from source needs only the Rust toolchain and works on both.

🍎 macOS — build from source

# 1. Install Rust (skip if you already have it)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh && source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

# 2. Build + run
git clone https://github.com/bozdemir/JeTTY.git && cd JeTTY
cargo build --release
./target/release/jetty

Renders through Metal. Summon with F9 — on Mac keyboards where the function-row keys default to media actions, press fn+F9 so the OS delivers F9. You can also bind jetty --toggle to a shortcut via a launcher (the first press launches JeTTY; each subsequent press toggles the running instance via the single-instance socket). A locally built binary is not quarantined, so there's no Gatekeeper prompt. (Prebuilt .app / .dmg are on the roadmap.)

🍎 macOS (.app bundle with Dock icon)

cargo build --release
sh scripts/make-macos-app.sh      # builds JeTTY.app with the Dock/Finder icon
open JeTTY.app                     # run the bundle, NOT ./target/release/jetty

Note: the bare binary cannot show a Dock icon on macOS (winit limitation); the .app bundle is required. If the icon appears stale in the Dock, run killall Dock once to flush the icon cache.

🐧 Linux — one-line installer (prebuilt, no toolchain)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bozdemir/JeTTY/main/install.sh | sh

Installs to ~/.local/bin by default. The script verifies the published SHA256SUMS.txt checksum before installing. For a system-wide install:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bozdemir/JeTTY/main/install.sh | JETTY_PREFIX=/usr/local sudo -E sh

Also available: a launcher entry. Or grab a .deb / AppImage from the latest release:

sudo apt install ./jetty_*_amd64.deb                              # Debian / Ubuntu
chmod +x JeTTY-*-x86_64.AppImage && ./JeTTY-*-x86_64.AppImage     # any distro

Build from source (Linux or macOS)

git clone https://github.com/bozdemir/JeTTY.git && cd JeTTY
cargo build --release && ./target/release/jetty

Prebuilt artifacts (.deb, AppImage, tarball, checksums) are published by CI when a v* tag is pushed — Linux x86_64 today; macOS prebuilt builds are on the roadmap. Until then, macOS users build from source (above).

Global summon hotkey

• X11 — F9 works immediately, no setup.
• Wayland — Wayland routes global shortcuts through the compositor, so bind jetty --toggle to a key (first press launches JeTTY; each press after toggles the running instance via the single-instance socket; --show / --hide set the state explicitly). See docs/global-hotkey.md. (Note: in Dropdown mode, top-edge anchoring relies on window positioning, which the compositor controls on Wayland — it works fully on X11.)

⌨️ Keybindings

Key	Action
F9	Summon / hide JeTTY (global; fn+F9 on macOS)
Ctrl+Shift+P	Open settings dialog
Ctrl+Shift+T	New tab
Ctrl+Shift+W	Close tab (with confirm)
Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Next / previous tab
Ctrl+Shift+D	Detach tab into its own window / reattach
F11	Toggle fullscreen (whole monitor) for the focused window
Cmd+Ctrl+F (macOS)	Same — macOS also seeds this, because bare F11 there is Mission Control's "Show Desktop" (and Volume Down on Apple keyboards without Use F1, F2… as standard function keys)
Drag tab off the bar	Detach (drop the window on the bar to reattach)
Right-click tab	Detach / Rename / Close menu
Ctrl+1‒9	Jump to tab
Ctrl + + / - / 0	Font size up / down / reset
Ctrl+Shift + + / -	Opacity up / down
Left-drag	Select text (auto-copies)
Shift+drag	Select text over mouse-aware apps (vim/htop/tmux/Claude Code)
Right-click	Copy / Paste / Select All / Clear / Close Tab menu
Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V	Copy / Paste
Ctrl+D	Close the shell (and window)

Theme is chosen by clicking a theme card in the Settings dialog (Ctrl+Shift+P) — there is no theme keybinding.

⚡ Performance

Measured headlessly on an Intel Arc iGPU at 1920×1200 (cargo run --release -p jetty-app --bin jetty-bench):

Metric	JeTTY	Target
Frame render (full screen)	5.5 ms (180 fps cap)	≤ 6.9 ms (144 Hz)
Idle CPU	~0 %	0 %
Per-frame snapshot (11k cells)	0.047 ms	≤ 1 ms
VT throughput	154 MB/s	≥ 150 MB/s

Speed is a gated requirement, not an afterthought — see docs/perf-budget.md.

🧱 Architecture

A small Cargo workspace with clear boundaries:

Crate	Responsibility
jetty-core	VT model (alacritty_terminal), PTY, themes, grid snapshot
jetty-render	GPU layers — text (glyphon/cosmic-text), quads, panel, menu, summon-effect shaders
jetty-platform	Window creation (winit), raw-window-handle plumbing
jetty-app	Event loop, input, clipboard, tabs, settings, hotkey, window modes, the binary

🤝 Collaborators wanted

JeTTY is in active early development and we're looking for collaborators. Whether you want to own a feature, fix a bug, or just trade ideas — you're welcome, at any experience level.

Great places to jump in right now:

• Native Wayland global shortcut (XDG GlobalShortcuts portal)
• Multi-monitor awareness & per-monitor dropdown placement
• More summon effects / themes / visual polish
• Faster cold start
• Packaging (PPA, AUR, Flatpak research), docs

How to get involved: open an issue or discussion, or send a pull request. New to the code? The architecture section is a good place to start.

🗺️ Roadmap

• Native Wayland global shortcut via the XDG GlobalShortcuts portal
• Multi-monitor awareness
• Launchpad PPA (apt install jetty) + AUR package
• Faster cold start
• More summon effects and themes

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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_{Built in Rust. Speed first. 🚀}