Termite

Termite is a small Wayland terminal emulator written in Rust.

It is intentionally opinionated: GPU-rendered, event-driven, configured in Rust, and extended through in-process plugins compiled into the binary. The goal is not full terminal feature parity. The goal is a fast terminal that is easy to read, hack on, and shape for a personal workflow.

Licensed under GPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE.

Status

Termite is usable for day-to-day shell, tmux, and editor work on Wayland, but it is still young.

Works now:

• Wayland window via winit
• GPU presentation via wgpu
• PTY-backed shell
• event-driven redraws
• scrollback with Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown
• mouse reporting for tmux/nvim-style TUIs
• mouse selection, Ctrl-Shift-C copy, Ctrl-Shift-V paste
• OSC 52 clipboard writes, including tmux copy mode
• truecolor, indexed color, basic style attributes, alternate screen
• compiled Rust config for theme, font, opacity, and plugins
• built-in cursor line, screen opacity, and cursor trail plugins

Known gaps:

• Wayland only
• no scrollback search yet
• no custom keybinding config yet
• no full terminal conformance claim
• TERM still defaults to xterm-256color until custom terminfo is worth requiring

Run

cargo run --release -p c_term_app

Exit the shell normally with exit or Ctrl-D. Ctrl-Q is also handled as an emergency quit.

Controls

Action	Input
Copy selected text	Ctrl-Shift-C
Paste clipboard	Ctrl-Shift-V
Scroll history	Shift-PageUp / Shift-PageDown
Select text	Mouse drag
Select text while an app tracks mouse	Shift-drag
Quit Termite	Ctrl-Q

Mouse wheel scrolls history when the active application has not enabled mouse tracking. When tmux, nvim, or another TUI enables mouse tracking, wheel and clicks are sent to the application.

Tmux Clipboard

Tmux copy mode uses OSC 52 to copy out to the host terminal. Termite handles that sequence and writes to the Wayland clipboard.

For tmux 3.5a, the default xterm*:clipboard feature is enough when Termite is running as TERM=xterm-256color. If a local tmux config has disabled clipboard handling, restore it with:

set -g set-clipboard on
set -as terminal-features ',xterm-256color:clipboard'

After rebuilding Termite, restart the Termite window so tmux sees the new binary and terminal behavior.

Project Shape

The workspace has two crates:

• c_term_core: parser, grid state, scrollback, terminal modes, identity, and damage tracking.
• c_term_app: PTY/window integration, rendering, compiled config, clipboard integration, and built-in plugins.

Rendering is event-driven. PTY output, input, resize events, animation timers, and compositor redraw requests drive frames. The CPU side maintains a terminal grid and damage model; the app side renders updated rows into a texture and presents with wgpu.

Compiled Config

Configuration is Rust code in crates/c_term_app/src/config.rs.

Edit it, rebuild, run. The default config composes font choice, theme colors, opacity, and visual plugins:

pub(crate) fn runner() -> Runner {
    Runner::new()
        .with(terminal_font())
        .with(terminal_theme())
        .with(terminal_plugins())
}

Plugins and presets are composed with parts():

fn terminal_plugins() -> impl RunnerPart {
    parts()
        .with(screen_opacity_plugin())
        .with(cursor_line_plugin())
        .with(cursor_trail_plugin())
}

This is closer to dwm-style compiled configuration than runtime config files.

Docs

• Architecture
• Compiled Config And Plugins
• Terminal Identity And Clipboard

Terminfo

Termite currently launches shells with TERM=xterm-256color plus TERM_PROGRAM=termite. That keeps basic tools working without installing a custom terminfo entry.

A draft terminfo source is included for later:

tic -x terminfo/termite.terminfo

See Terminal Identity And Clipboard for the details.