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tmnl

About tmnl

tmnl is a GPU-rendered terminal emulator with a structured-cell display surface — apps can connect over a Unix socket and ship typed cell Frames straight into the grid, skipping the ANSI round-trip entirely. It also hosts your $SHELL like any other terminal, with offline AI command completion and OSC 133 shell integration baked in.

It’s small. One author, written in Rust, designed to be the host for a class of terminal apps that couldn’t exist before.

Two tracks

Section titled “Two tracks”

tmnl runs in two modes from the same window. Shell mode is your daily driver — a GPU terminal hosting your $SHELL with mouse, OSC 133, and offline AI completion. Native mode is the differentiator — apps connect over a Unix socket and ship typed cell Frame { cells: [Cell { ch, fg, bg, attrs }] } directly into tmnl’s GPU grid via tmnl-protocol. No vt100, no escape codes, no parser between the app’s intent and the pixels. DiffRun puts only changed cell-runs on the wire; apps set their own tab titles.

Reference clients: mnml (terminal IDE) and mixr (terminal DJ). Both ship a --blit <socket> mode that connects them as native tmnl tabs.

Why native mode matters

Section titled “Why native mode matters”

If you’ve ever tried to render a real UI inside a terminal — fine-grained graphics, knobs, structured grids — you’ve fought ANSI. tmnl’s native mode is the escape: an app opens a Unix socket, ships Frame messages of typed cells, and tmnl draws them on the GPU. No vt100 parser between the app and the screen. App and terminal agree on a Grid instead of trading bytes.

Inside tmnl, mixr’s crossfader renders as actual graphics, not unicode block art. mnml gets native-tab integration with workspace switching. You don’t have to use any of this — tmnl works fine as a regular terminal emulator hosting your shell. The cell-streaming layer just makes it the host for a class of apps that couldn’t exist before. See Native tabs for the full protocol walkthrough.

State of the project

Section titled “State of the project”

tmnl is v0.1.x. It’s solid as a daily driver on macOS for me (the author), but it has sharp edges:

  • macOS is the primary platform. Linux and Windows ship binaries via the same release pipeline (.deb / .AppImage / .msi — see Install) and the wgpu cell pipeline runs everywhere, but the native menu bar is mac-only, and not every integration has been validated end-to-end on the other platforms. Treat non-macOS as second-class but not abandoned.
  • No scrollback search, no font-config UI. Font config rides through TOML (~/.config/tmnl/config.toml), but there’s no Settings-overlay row for it yet. Scrollback search (Cmd+F is wired for the focused pane, but it doesn’t search backwards through paged-out history) is the next pass.
  • Native-mode SDK is published as tmnl-protocol on crates.io — Client::connect, capability negotiation (Caps::CLIENT_COMMANDS / FOCUS_EVENTS / HOVER_EVENTS / IME_EVENTS / INLINE_IMAGES), the published Client::run_loop driver. mnml and mixr ride it daily. A second non-family reference client is still ahead.

For shipped features see FEATURES.md; for the roadmap see .local/PLAN.md (or just file an issue).

See also

Section titled “See also”