I was searching for a good quality but simple terminal for MacOS and I couldn’t really find what I was looking for interface wise (I used to use iTerm for a long time but it started getting more and more bloated and laggy on me – using up a lot of system power on battery and I don’t want all that AI stuff baked in).

I started a project earlier this year but got stuck on it because I was trying to implement a basic ANSI parser which was a mistake on my part. I didn’t realize how incredibly complicated that finite state machine would be, esp with bash and ansi apps sending complicated instructions into the machine! I then asked Google AI for help and it pointed me to a GitHub page that hosted a libvterm (from vim) that was compatible with Objective-C.

I’ve been working on this app non-stop for the last 5 days now and I only have the basics covered, I didn’t realize how much code it took just to make a basic text processing input/output app but I think this is one of my more complicated code bases (possibly TurnTable is the other app of mine that might be more complicated but that one is in Swift).

I still have a lot more work on my todo list for and I will continue development on it now that I got ANSI parsing to work, the rest is just mainly ViewController and functionality features. I targeted it for the bash shell so I don’t know if it works with other shells but this is just my first release post about it.

Feature List

• Window Colors / Opacity / Blur
• Selector / Highlighter Separator Character List
• Auto Copy On Selection
• Single-Line Paste Manual Enter
• Multi-Line Paste Prevention Protection
• Multi-Window / Multi-Tab (Per Window Only)
• Left Aligned Tab Titles With Monospace Font
• Scriptable Updatable Window And Tab Title Text
• Separated Open / Close Tab Buttons Reducing Accidental Closures
• Smooth Scroll Locking
• Clear Console Command
• Basic Hot Key Support
• Live System Stats Bar (CPU, RAM, NET)
• Independent Prompt Text Input Separated From Console Text Output (Found No Where Else!)
• Dynamic Shell Prompt Text (Found No Where Else!)
• Simple Clean Minimal Functional Design
• Dock Icon!!

User Beware – This is a brand new framework and their may be bugs (or at the very least incompatibilities)!

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Source Code: https://github.com/stoops/SimpleShell