Termoil is a terminal for Windows, macOS and Linux with tabs, splits, pictures, ligatures, 894 themes, 22 shaders and 20 cursor effects. A key press reaches the screen in under 2 ms, an idle window uses 13 MB of memory, and every action it has can be run from the command line or by an AI agent.
This is the Synthwave Everything theme with the neon-glow shader and the pulse cursor effect. neon-glow makes text bloom, washes the screen from magenta to cyan, and adds soft scanlines and a vignette. The pulse effect follows your cursor wherever it goes.
Three lines in the settings file: theme = "Synthwave Everything", then shader = "neon-glow" and cursor_effect = "pulse" under [window].
The retro shader draws your terminal on a curved tube with glow, scanlines, noise and a little flicker, in the style of cool-retro-term. Here it is over a live system dashboard and vim, both still sharp enough to read and work in.
crt, amber, green-phosphor and vhs give other kinds of old screen.
termoil +set-shader crt changes the shader in a running window, and so do the theme picker, the command palette and an agent through MCP. The clip goes through twelve of them over the same vim and git graph.
A shader can also be your own WGSL file, read again whenever you save it.
A cursor effect draws light or a distortion around the cursor: a pulse, sonar rings, a ripple, a rainbow, a flame, orbiting dots, sparkles, a magnifying glass and more. It runs on top of any shader, or on its own.
termoil +set-cursor-effect sonar sets one, and none turns it off.
The theme picker has three lists side by side: themes, shaders and cursor effects. Each one is applied to your terminal as you move to it, so you judge it on your own code. Enter keeps all three, and Escape puts back what you had.
Open it from the command palette with choose-theme. Typing filters the list you are in.
Measured against Ghostty for Windows on the same machine, in the same size of window, with each terminal on its default settings. An idle Termoil window does no work at all unless you choose a moving shader, and the window draws on the processor until a shader asks for the graphics card.
Open as many tabs as you like and split any of them into panes, side by side or one above the other, nested as deep as you want. PowerShell, WSL and cmd sit in tabs next to each other. Drag a divider or use the keyboard to resize, and zoom one pane to fill its tab.
It appears when you open a second tab and goes away when you close back down to one.
PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, cmd, WSL, bash, zsh, fish and nushell.
Ctrl+Shift+T opens a tab, Ctrl+Shift+D splits right, Ctrl+Shift+E splits down and Alt+Arrow moves between panes.
One pane fills the tab, and the same key puts the split back.
Programs can draw images in Termoil through the kitty graphics protocol, sixel or iTerm2 inline images, and animated kitty images play. On Windows, Termoil ships its own copy of the console host, because the one built into Windows removes these pictures before they reach the terminal.
The kitty graphics protocol, sixel and iTerm2 inline images, so the image previews in your tools work.
A program that replaces its kitty image many times a second gets a moving picture. The zoom here runs at about 20 frames a second.
The console host built into Windows removes these pictures. Termoil ships its own copy, which passes them through.
Every buffer Termoil keeps, pictures included, has a fixed limit, so a stream of output cannot make it use unbounded memory.
24 bit color, the 256 color palette, bold, italic, faint, strikethrough, overline and five kinds of underline in any color. Emoji, wide Chinese, Japanese and Korean text, combining accents and programming ligatures. Box drawing, block and braille characters are drawn by Termoil itself, so they join cleanly at any font size.
Single, double, curly, dotted and dashed, each in its own color, the way editors mark spelling and compiler errors.
Joined emoji such as families and flags take the width they should, and a missing character falls back to another installed font.
Programs that draw pictures out of colored half blocks, such as btop and chafa, get exactly the colors they send.
Text that falls below a contrast ratio of 4.5 against its background is lifted, so dim text stays readable on any theme.
`Ctrl+Shift+P` opens a list of every action Termoil has, with the key bound to each one. Type a few letters and press Enter. Settings live in one plain TOML file that Termoil reads again a moment after you save it, and `Ctrl+,` opens every setting inside the window.
A key you rarely use is a few letters in the palette away.
Bind any action to any chord, and group bindings into key tables.
Termoil can follow the system setting, with a theme for each.
The palette, the keyboard, the command line and the MCP server all run actions through the same function.
Termoil loads a script into PowerShell, bash, zsh, fish, nushell and cmd that marks every prompt and command. Jump between prompts, select the output of the last command, and see a failed command’s exit code in its tab.
Nothing to install: the script is loaded into each shell Termoil opens.
A raytraced scene drawn as colored half blocks, every cell repainted as fast as a Python program can send it. A frame takes under 5 ms to draw at the 99th percentile.
A key press reaches the screen in under 2 ms at the median and under 5 ms at the 99th percentile.
Every action in Termoil is a row in one catalogue, and the keyboard, the command palette, the command line and the MCP server all run actions through the same function. An agent can open a tab, type into it, wait for the command to finish and read the screen, while you watch the same tab and take over at any point.
The tool list and the command reference are generated from the catalogue, and a test fails if either drifts from it.
wait-prompt reads the prompt marks shell integration adds, and returns the exit code.
The command line and the MCP server talk to Termoil over a named pipe or socket only your user can open.
termoil-gui --separate gives an agent or a test a Termoil of its own, apart from your windows.
From Unluminous 1.24, the terminal tile, the run tile, the debug console, a terminal on a Realm canvas and the terminal each Agent Tasks ticket starts its agent in all run on Termoil: its parser and screen, its pseudoterminal and its key encoding. Unluminous draws the cells itself, in its own theme and zoom.
From 1.25 it draws everything Termoil’s parser knows about each cell: pictures sent through the kitty graphics protocol, sixel or iTerm2 inline images, color emoji, overline and five underline styles in their own color, accents centered over their letter, and box drawing, block and braille characters drawn to fill the cell.
So Claude Code and Codex get every key they ask for, including Shift+Enter for a new line, and each terminal reads its program’s output on a thread of its own, never on the window’s.
See Unluminous
It reads program output 226% faster than the alacritty_terminal core Unluminous used before.
The kitty keyboard protocol with all five of its flags, so Shift+Enter reaches Claude Code as its own key.
A link a program prints is underlined under the pointer and opens with Ctrl or Cmd and a click. Ctrl+Shift+Up and Down, Cmd+Up and Down on a Mac, jump between prompts.
Closing a terminal ends every program it started, through a job object on Windows.
Termoil 1.3.1 and Ghostty 1.4.0 running the same demos at once: color, text styles, emoji, pictures, a TUI editor, a raytraced scene, a Mandelbrot zoom, a dashboard and a flood of build output. Then the measured numbers, then what Termoil adds.
Paste them into Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or any agent that can fetch a page and run a command. It installs Termoil for your system, checks it, and connects itself to Termoil’s MCP server.
The Windows build is the one tested most. The Linux packages are tested under WSL, and the macOS build is cross compiled on Windows, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and has not yet been run on a Mac.
These are the stable downloads. The newest nightly is Termoil 1.5.12, released 2026-11-11. Set updates.channel = "nightly" in Termoil to be offered every nightly.
Termoil is free and open source. A star on GitHub helps other people find it.