Warp was my favorite for a long time, but as new features were added it gradually became heavier, so I switched to Ghostty. I like Ghostty because it lets you use fragment shaders you’ve written yourself as the background. After that, I tried Cmux, which is based on Ghostty and lets you do even more, and I used it for about a month. However, its RAM usage turned out to be much higher than I expected, so I was thinking I might go back to iTerm2 when I discovered Terax on Better Stack.
Unfortunately, Terax doesn’t provide a build for Intel Macs, so I built it myself. In this article, I’ll walk through the steps I took.
My Terminal History
Terminal app
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iTerm 2 (still using)
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Warp
Warp — The Agentic Development Environment
Ship faster with AI-powered terminal and coding agents.
warp.dev
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Ghostty
Ghostty
Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
ghostty.org
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Cmux
cmux — The terminal built for multitasking
Free and open source macOS terminal for AI coding agents. Works with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Kiro, Aider, and any CLI tool.
cmux.com
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Terax ← now
Terax - Terminal-first AI-native dev workspace
Terax is a lightweight AI terminal with a built-in editor, AI agents, voice input, and live web preview. 7 MB on disk, 300 ms cold start. Free and open source. BYOK or fully local via LM Studio.
terax.app
I loved Warp but
A lightweight AI terminal with a built-in editor, AI agents, and live web preview. 7 MB on disk. 300 ms cold start. BYOK or fully local.
my current
You can set an image as the background as well as other Terminal apps but Terax is lighter and faster than them 😎
Terax is a lightweight open-source terminal (ADE) built on Tauri 2 + Rust and React 19. A native PTY backend with a WebGL renderer, an agentic AI side-panel that runs against your own keys or fully local models, plus a code editor, file explorer, source control with a git graph, and a web preview pane built in. About 7-8 MB on disk. No telemetry. No account.
Screenshots
 Multi-tab terminal with WebGL rendering |
 Custom themes, presets, and background images |
 Web preview of local dev servers |
 Source control panel with git graph in history |
 Agentic AI workflow with edit diffs in the code editor |
|
Features
Terminal
- xterm.js with WebGL renderer, multi-tab with background streaming
- GPU-accelerated block-based terminal with editor-like command input
- Native PTY backend via
portable-pty(zsh, bash, pwsh, fish, cmd) - Split panels (horizontal and vertical)
- Inline search, link…
Building Terax from Source
Prerequisites
- Rust (stable) — install via rustup
- Node.js 20+
- pnpm v10 — install via mise (recommended) or directly
- Platform prerequisites from Tauri's getting started guide
Install pnpm v10 via mise or npm
mise install pnpm@10.32.1
mise use pnpm@10.32.1
# npm
npm i -g pnpm
Development build
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev
Production build
macOS — Intel (x86_64)
rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build --target x86_64-apple-darwin
Output: src-tauri/target/x86_64-apple-darwin/release/bundle/macos/Terax.app
Notes
- The first build takes 20–40 minutes as Rust compiles all dependencies from scratch. Subsequent builds use the cache and are much faster.
- DMG creation requires macOS system tools (
hdiutil). If the DMG step fails, theTerax.appbundle is still usable — copy it to/Applicationsor run it directly. - Code signing is optional for local builds. The CI uses Apple certificates and notarization for release builds.
