The Oxized terminal emulator
OxTerm is a terminal emulator in Rust and Gtk4. It is Currently in an early stage of development but usable for day to day tasks. OxTerm is a possible spiritual successor to Zterm in that it is planned to be relatively simple, with a minimal graphical interface, yet have a few nice power user features such as split panes as well as some nice theming options. It is also an acknowledgement that using a pre-1.0 language such as Zig comes with some major challenges. Finally, there is a lot that was learned both in implementing Zterm and in other projects since, and the code in Zterm is definitely sub-optimal in a number of areas which lead to challenges in the future development of the codebase.
- Tabbed interface
- Flexible split tabs
- Theming
- Fonts
- Colors
- Backgrounds
- Solid colors
- Gradients
- Images
- Transparency
- User configurable keybindings
Make sure to install the required dependencies. Arch has an official package for
gtk4 and an aur package for vte4-git. To install both using
pikaur:
pikaur -S gtk4 vte4-gitOnce the dependencies are installed the program is compiled using Cargo.
cargo build --release
sudo install -v target/release/oxterm /usr/local/bin
A lot of Linux distros are significantly behind in packaging Gtk+ version 4 and will not have a new enough version in their official repos to build OxTerm. It is even less likely that you will find a package for vte compiled for gtk4. It is still possible to install OxTerm on these systems by compiling the required dependencies from source. This situation is expected to improve rapidly over the next year or so as Gnome transitions more completely from Gtk+ version 3 to Gtk+ version 4.
FreeBSD has a compatible package for Gtk+ version 4, but not for Vte.
The following table gives the default keybindings. If any customization is desired, see configuration
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Ctrl/Shift/T | New Tab |
| Ctrl/Shift/W | Close Tab |
| Ctrl/PageDown | Next tab |
| Ctrl/PageUp | Previous Tab |
| Ctrl/Shift/Enter | Split Tab Horizontally |
| Alt/Enter | Split Tab Vertically |
| Alt/[1-9] | Goto [num] Tab |
| Ctrl/Shift/N | New Window |
| Ctrl/Shift/A | Show About Info |
| Ctrl/Shift/Q | Close Window |
Most of the planned configuration items are not yet implemented.
Keybindings may be changed from their defaults by creating and editing the file
~/.config/oxterm/keys.toml.
# Sample keys.toml file
[keys]
new_tab = "<primary><Shift>S"The first field is the action name, while the value is the key combination consisting of one or more modifiers and a key value. If the action name is misspelled or does not refer to a valid action it will be ignored, while if the keybinding specified does not parse to a valid keybinding the program will fall back to it's default for that action.