pt

personal terminal · also written pterm

Your terminal, with the whole project around it.

A Linux terminal workspace — projects, splits, tabs and git in one window, built on GTK4 and libghostty-vt.
Free, no telemetry, no subscription.

What it is

A terminal is usually one window per thing you are doing. pt turns that around: each project is an entry in the sidebar, and it keeps its own tabs, splits and working directories. Switch to a project and everything is where you left it — nothing to reopen, nothing to cd back into.

The VT layer is libghostty-vt, so escape-sequence handling is someone else's solved problem. The rest is GTK4 and libadwaita.

Features

Install

Prebuilt tarballs for Linux x86_64 and aarch64 are published on GitHub Releases. The installer puts pt in ~/.local/bin, adds the prompt snippets, and registers a desktop entry and icon so it shows up in your launcher.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/hdprajwal/pt/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

Set PT_PREFIX to change the prefix, or pass a tag as an argument to pin a version. The runtime libraries still come from your package manager — GTK4 4.16 or newer, libadwaita and json-glib:

# Arch-based
sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel cmake pkgconf gtk4 libadwaita json-glib

Fonts are not bundled. The defaults are JetBrains Mono for the terminal and IBM Plex Sans for the UI — install them, or point the config at fonts you already have.

Build from source

You also need Zig 0.15.x, CMake 3.19 or newer, and network access on the first configure — ghostty's lib-vt is fetched at a pinned commit and built, so the first build takes a while. Later builds are incremental.

cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/pt

ctest --test-dir build   # tests

Selecting and copying text

Left-click and drag selects. Double-click selects a word, triple-click selects a line, and Ctrl+Shift+C copies (Ctrl+Shift+V pastes). Typing clears the selection and snaps the view back to the prompt.

Full-screen apps — Claude Code, vim, htop, lazygit, fzf — usually ask the terminal for the mouse, and pt hands it over. That is what makes their own mouse features work, including selecting text inside Claude Code, which copies it for you. Hold Shift while you drag to take the pointer back for that one gesture and select with pt instead.

The wheel is not part of that deal. An app that asks for the mouse gets the wheel whatever mouse-reporting says, because scrolling is not how you select text and an app on the alternate screen leaves pt nothing to scroll. Holding Shift takes the wheel back and moves pt's own view.

Set mouse-reporting = false if you would rather a plain drag always selected pt's own text. The cost is that click-driven features inside those apps stop working. Either way, "Toggle mouse reporting" in the palette flips the focused pane for the rest of the session without touching the config.

When a program copies for you

A program can put text on your clipboard by printing an escape sequence (OSC 52). That is how a yank in nvim over ssh, tmux's copy mode, and selecting text inside Claude Code all reach the clipboard on the machine you are sitting at. pt allows it out of the box.

The same sequence has a second form that asks the terminal what is on the clipboard instead. pt never answers it, at any setting. Anything running in a pane could use it to read what you last copied, including something on the far end of an ssh session.

Set osc52 = ask to approve each one. The dialog says which pane asked and how many bytes it wants to copy. osc52 = off ignores clipboard writes completely.

Configuration

pt reads ~/.config/pt/config, a key = value file where # starts a comment. Those seven keys, plus app-* colour-token overrides such as app-background = #101010, are the entire config surface.

theme = pt-dark
font-size = 9
font-family = JetBrains Mono
ui-font-size = 12.5
ui-font-family = IBM Plex Sans
mouse-reporting = true
osc52 = write

Booleans accept true/false, yes/no, on/off or 1/0. osc52 takes write, ask or off. Custom themes go in ~/.config/pt/themes/; both the config and the active theme are watched and applied live.

Shell prompt integration

Source the snippet for your shell from its rc file. Bash and fish variants live next to the zsh one in share/prompt/.

# ~/.zshrc
source ~/.local/share/pt/prompt/pt-prompt.zsh

The snippet is a no-op outside pt, so sourcing it unconditionally is safe. Inside pt it reports each command's exit code back to the app and prints an identity line — path, branch, dirty count — in the project's accent colour. If a repository with a huge untracked tree makes the prompt slow, set PT_PROMPT_GIT_UNTRACKED=no to count only tracked changes.