Macterm A lightweight macOS terminal with vertical tabs, session persistence, and native UI. Built on libghostty
brew install --cask thdxg/tap/macterm
The vertical project sidebar — projects and their tabs, stacked where there's room to read them.
Features
01
Session persistence
Quitting detaches your shells instead of killing them. Relaunch; they come back — scrollback and running processes intact.
02
Multiplexing
Drag a pane onto another to join them, or separate one into its own tab — by drag or by keybind.
03
Remote projects
Open a directory on another machine over SSH. Panes persist on the host, surviving quits, dropped connections, even a local reboot.
04
Vertical project sidebar
Organize projects and their tabs in a native macOS sidebar, stacked vertically where there's actually room to read them.
05
Pinned tabs
Pin a tab above your projects to keep it running — it starts on every launch, and restores itself with its command if the session dies.
06
Command palette
Press ⌘P to split panes, switch projects, or open a directory — every action a keystroke away.
07
Declarative layouts
Describe a project's tabs, splits, and per-pane commands in ~/.config/macterm/projects/. Open it; the workspace builds itself.
08
Control CLI
A bundled macterm command drives the running app over a socket — so scripts and AI agents can spawn panes and run commands.
09
Quick terminal
A global terminal that drops down from anywhere with a hotkey, then gets out of your way when you're done.
10
Adaptive background
The window picks up the background color the running program paints.
11
Ghostty compatibility
Reads your existing ghostty/config. Theme, font, keybinds — all of it just works.
Built on libghostty
Macterm's terminal is libghostty — the same engine behind Ghostty, linked directly rather than reimplemented. GPU rendering, escape-sequence handling, font shaping, and key encoding are Ghostty's, so a TUI that draws correctly there draws correctly here.
What Macterm adds is everything around it: a vertical project sidebar, tabs and splits that outlive the app, persistent projects on remote machines, and much more. It reads your existing Ghostty config unchanged — theme, font, palette, keybinds — so switching costs you no configuration.
More on the relationship in Macterm vs. Ghostty, and on replacing your multiplexer in Macterm vs. tmux.
Install
Homebrew
brew install --cask thdxg/tap/macterm
The cask strips the Gatekeeper quarantine attribute on install, so the app launches without extra prompts.
From Releases
xattr -cr /Applications/Macterm.app
Download the latest .dmg from Releases, drag Macterm to Applications, then clear the quarantine flag once. Sparkle handles updates from there.