KazeTerm

Under development

A lightweight cross-platform terminal app based on Alacritty, inspired by Windows Terminal.

Screenshot

Documentation

More details can be found at wiki

Config Overlays

Kazeterm loads kazeterm.toml as the base config and can merge extra TOML files listed in imports. Imported files have higher priority than the base file, and later imports override earlier ones.

imports = ["~/kazeterm.windows.toml"]

Relative import paths are resolved from the file that declares them, and nested imports are supported.

Themes

Theme files in assets/themes/*.toml are seed-based. Most UI colors are derived from:

• background
• foreground
• accent
• border
• ANSI black..white plus optional bright_*

Kazeterm also supports a small set of optional semantic overrides when the derived defaults are not enough:

• cursor
• overlay
• selection
• search_match
• search_highlight

Terminal kernel

Terminal backends are selected through the terminal kernel abstraction:

[terminal]
kernel = "alacritty"

Supported values are alacritty (default), ghostty, and vte. Unsupported kernels fail explicitly instead of silently falling back.

Key debug overlay

Enable the bottom-right shortcut inspector with:

[window]
key_debug_mode = true

How to Build

Environment Setup

Windows

MSVC target is required for release build.

Fedora

dnf install -y \
  clang \
  llvm \
  libxcb-devel \
  libxkbcommon-devel \
  libxkbcommon-x11-devel

Ubuntu

apt install -y \
  clang \
  llvm \
  libxcb1-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev \
  libxkbcommon-x11-dev

macOS

XCode is needed for metal sdk

xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer
xcodebuild -runFirstLaunch
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

Run Build Commands

For debug build, run:

cargo build

For release build, run:

cargo build --release

On Windows, debug symbols are stored in PDB files, and on Linux they are in the binary. To strip symbols from the binary, run:

llvm-objcopy --strip-all ./target/release/kazeterm

Testing and Coverage

Run all unit and integration tests:

cargo test --workspace

UI test coverage

Kazeterm's GPUI-based UI is exercised headlessly via gpui's test-support feature (enabled as a dev-dependency on the kazeterm crate):

• Component tests live next to the components they exercise (crates/kazeterm/src/components/*_dialog.rs, search_bar.rs, …) and use #[gpui::test] with a shared helper in crates/kazeterm/src/test_support.rs that installs a default Config + SettingsStore for each test window.
• Keybinding regression tests in crates/config/tests/default_keybindings.rs lock down the default bindings shipped with KeybindingConfig::default().
• Event-protocol tests in crates/kazeterm-event-system/tests/json_event_protocol.rs guard the stdin/socket JSON wire format.
• Headless terminal tests in crates/terminal/tests/headless_terminal.rs drive an in-memory alacritty_terminal::Term through the ANSI parser — no PTY, no child process — and assert on the resulting grid. This is the foundation for behavioural testing of escape-sequence handling.
• Snapshot tests in crates/terminal/tests/snapshot_grid.rs use insta to snapshot rendered grids for a set of canned ANSI scenarios. Run cargo insta review --workspace to accept intentional changes; set INSTA_UPDATE=always when bulk-regenerating.
• End-to-end tests in crates/kazeterm/src/components/main_window_e2e_tests.rs boot a real MainWindow against a fake terminal-session factory (terminal::test_support::fake_terminal_session). They verify that insert_new_tab wires through to the factory and that MainWindow.items is updated. No child process is ever spawned.

Running just the UI-level tests:

cargo test --package kazeterm --bin kazeterm
cargo test --package config --test default_keybindings
cargo test --package kazeterm-event-system --test json_event_protocol
cargo test --package terminal --test headless_terminal
cargo test --package terminal --test snapshot_grid
cargo test --package terminal --test fake_session

End-to-end tests now boot MainWindow against a fake session factory (see crates/kazeterm/src/components/main_window_e2e_tests.rs). The only remaining layer is optional GPU visual snapshots, which are deliberately not shipped (documented in plan.md under "Still not shipped").

Generate coverage (requires cargo-llvm-cov):

cargo llvm-cov --workspace --all-features --lcov --output-path coverage/lcov.info

This produces coverage/lcov.info.

License

• Some code is derived from Zed; this code inherits Zed's GPL-v3 license.

• The bundled Cascadia Code fonts follow the SIL Open Font License.

• The bundled lucide icons follows original MIT license.