Let's be honest: modern developer tools are getting bloated.
I love the AI features of next-gen terminals and editors, but I was getting tired of the fact that every new tool seemed to be an Electron app that consumes 1GB of RAM just to idle in the background. On top of that, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of streaming my terminal output to cloud APIs just to get a command prediction.
So, I decided to build my own.
Meet NovaTerm—a blazing fast, open-source terminal workspace built with Rust and Tauri v2.
novitaswebworks
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novaterm
NovaTerm – An open-source, <10MB Tauri terminal with local AI
NovaTerm
A Next-Generation, AI-Native Terminal Workspace
Built by Novitas WebWorks
⚡ Overview
NovaTerm is a high-performance, lightweight, and extensible AI-native terminal emulator designed for modern workflows. Built on top of Tauri v2 (Rust) and React 19, it brings together a fully functional native PTY backend with a blazingly fast WebGL renderer.
Instead of juggling multiple tools, NovaTerm unifies your workspace:
- 💻 Native Terminal: High-performance rendering via
xterm.jsand Rust'sportable-pty. - 🤖 Agentic AI: A built-in AI side-panel that can read your project context, write files, and safely execute bash commands with your approval.
- 📝 Code Editor: Built-in editor powered by CodeMirror, complete with syntax highlighting and multi-file editing.
- 📁 File Explorer: Visual file management, Git graphs, and source control integration right next to your command line.
Weighing in at under 10MB on disk, it is lightweight, lightning-fast (300ms cold start), and deeply customizable.
✨ Features
- Blazing Fast: Written…
Here’s a breakdown of how I built it, the architecture choices, and how you can run AI models inside it entirely offline. 👇
🛑 The Problem with Electron Terminals
When you open an Electron-based terminal, you are essentially booting up a full instance of Chromium and Node.js.
To solve this, I used Tauri v2. Tauri doesn't bundle a browser; it hooks directly into your operating system's native webview (WKWebView on Mac, WebView2 on Windows).
By writing the core logic in Rust, the compiled NovaTerm binary sits at under 10MB. Better yet, the cold start time is around 300ms. It opens the moment you click it.
🧠 Privacy-First AI via Ollama
The coolest part of NovaTerm isn't just the speed—it's the AI integration.
Instead of hardcoding a dependency on OpenAI, NovaTerm is designed to integrate seamlessly with Ollama and LM Studio.
Here is what happens when you hook it up to a local model (like Llama 3 or deepseek-coder):
- Ghost-Text Predictions: As you type a complex Docker or Git command, the local AI predicts the rest of your command in real-time.
- AI Tutor Mode: If a command fails and throws an error, you can hit Cmd+Shift+L. The AI instantly reads the PTY output and explains exactly what went wrong.
Because inference happens on your own GPU, there is zero network latency, and absolutely zero data leaves your machine. (Though you can still plug in your OpenAI API key if you want to Bring Your Own Key!).
📝 A Built-in Code Editor
Context switching kills productivity. How many times have you been in the terminal and needed to edit a single line in a .env file or a .gitignore? Usually, you either wrestle with nano/vim or wait 5 seconds for VSCode to launch.
I embedded CodeMirror 6 natively into the UI. It sits right next to your terminal session with full syntax highlighting, a visual file tree, and multi-file editing. You get the speed of the CLI with the comfort of a GUI editor, all in one pane.
🚀 The Tech Stack Overview
If you're curious about the exact architecture:
• Backend: Rust + portable-pty (for native pseudo-terminal process management).
• Frontend Wrapper: Tauri v2
• UI: React 19 + Tailwind CSS
• Terminal Rendering: xterm.js with the WebGL add-on (hardware-accelerated GPU rendering).
• Editor: CodeMirror 6
Let me know what you think! 💬
NovaTerm is completely open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. I built this for developers who care about performance and privacy as much as I do.
You can download the installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux right here:
👉 https://novaterm.novitasweb.works
If you give it a try, please let me know what you think in the comments below! What local model do you plan on using it with? ***
