⚡ NovaTerm — A Fast, Beautiful Terminal for Windows

The GPU-accelerated, Rust-powered terminal emulator for Windows. Auto-detects every shell on your PC — PowerShell, CMD, WSL, Git Bash, Nushell — with a gorgeous, modern UI.

⬇ Download · Features · Shells · Themes · Build

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NovaTerm is a from-scratch Windows terminal emulator built in Rust + Tauri, engineered to beat Windows Terminal, WezTerm, Alacritty, Hyper, and ConEmu on speed, memory footprint, and design — with no AI gimmicks. Native ConPTY, a GPU (WebGL) renderer, a bundled Nerd Font, and a clean, keyboard-first interface.

Looking for a fast, modern Windows Terminal alternative? NovaTerm opens instantly, sips RAM, renders on the GPU, and shows you only the shells you actually have installed.

✨ Features

• 🖥️ Every shell, auto-detected — PowerShell 7, Windows PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL (one entry per installed distro), Git Bash, Nushell, MSYS2 and Cygwin. Uninstalled shells never clutter the menu.
• ⚡ GPU-accelerated rendering via xterm.js + WebGL with a cached glyph atlas — smooth at high refresh rates.
• 🦀 Native Rust core — ConPTY pseudo-console managed by a fast, low-latency byte pump.
• 🔤 Bundled Nerd Font (CaskaydiaCove) — powerline glyphs, icons and ligatures render correctly out of the box.
• 🎨 9 built-in themes — Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Dracula, Nord, Gruvbox, One Dark, GitHub Dark, Solarized, Fluent.
• 🗂️ Tabs with pinning, live titles, per-shell colors/icons, and a one-click Restart when a process exits.
• ⌨️ Copy / paste (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V), a command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), and a polished Settings panel.
• 🛡️ Run as Administrator — relaunch elevated with a single click.
• 🪟 Windows 11 Mica translucency, rounded corners, custom title bar.
• 🚀 Fast & light — instant cold start, low idle RAM, no Electron bloat.

⬇ Install

1. Download the latest NovaTerm_x64-setup.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run it — it installs to your user profile and creates Start Menu + Desktop shortcuts (no admin required).
3. Prefer no installer? Grab the portable .zip instead.

Requires the WebView2 runtime, which is preinstalled on Windows 10/11.

🐚 Every shell, auto-detected

NovaTerm probes your machine on startup and lists only the terminals you actually have — click + for the default, or the ▾ to pick any detected shell:

Shell	Detected from
PowerShell 7 (pwsh)	PATH · Program Files\PowerShell\7
Windows PowerShell	System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0
Command Prompt	System32\cmd.exe
WSL	wsl --list — one tab profile per installed distro
Git Bash	Program Files\Git · LocalAppData\Programs\Git
Nushell (nu)	PATH · ~/.cargo/bin
MSYS2 / Cygwin	C:\msys64 · C:\cygwin64

No installed shell? It simply doesn't appear — the menu stays clean.

🎨 Themes

Tokyo Night · Catppuccin Mocha · Dracula · Nord · Gruvbox Dark · One Dark · GitHub Dark · Solarized Dark · Fluent. Switch live from Settings (Ctrl+,) or the command palette — no restart.

🏗️ Architecture

A split-process model. A native Rust core owns the hot path — ConPTY, the output pump, session lifecycle, and shell detection. A Tauri v2 + React shell owns the UI and a GPU (WebGL) terminal renderer (xterm.js). The two halves talk over a typed, versioned protocol (nova-protocol). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

crates/
  nova-protocol   shared serde types (core <-> UI)
  nova-pty        native ConPTY wrapper (Win32 / windows crate)
  nova-terminal   VTE parser + grid + scrollback
  nova-config     JSON config, theme engine, shell auto-detection
  nova-storage    SQLite: history, workspaces, sessions
  nova-core       session orchestration + PTY pump + event bus
  nova-tauri      Tauri app: commands, events, Mica window
ui/               React + TypeScript + Tailwind + Vite + xterm.js
docs/             design documents

🔧 Build from source

# core crates (no UI) + unit tests
cargo build
cargo test

# install UI deps once
npm --prefix ui install

# dev (hot-reload UI + native core)
cd crates/nova-tauri; npm --prefix ../../ui run tauri dev

Production build (installer + standalone exe)

⚠️ Do not ship a plain cargo build of nova-tauri. Without the Tauri CLI it is compiled in dev mode and tries to load the Vite dev server (http://localhost:5173) at runtime — you'll get ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED. Always use tauri build, which embeds the frontend for a self-contained app.

# 1. build the frontend bundle
npm --prefix ui run build

# 2. produce the production binary + NSIS installer
cd crates/nova-tauri
npm --prefix ../../ui run tauri build

Outputs:

• target/release/nova-tauri.exe — standalone, self-contained (UI embedded; needs WebView2, preinstalled on Win 11).
• target/release/bundle/nsis/NovaTerm_<ver>_x64-setup.exe — installer that creates Start Menu + Desktop shortcuts.

📚 Documentation

• Architecture · Rendering · Plugins
• Security · Config & themes · Database
• Roadmap · Testing & CI/CD

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0.

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