I built a terminal emulator for Windows called Asterism.
The idea: a beautiful night-sky terminal, with no setup
Making a terminal look good usually means tuning colors, fonts, the prompt and the background one config file at a time — hard going if you're new to it. Split panes are the same: you can't really use them until you've memorized the shortcuts.
Asterism turns that around.
- Beautiful without any setup: the moment you open it, the starry background and a matching color scheme, font and prompt are already in place. No config files to write.
- Split panes from the GUI: split from the right-click menu or a toolbar button. The new pane opens on the same host, in the same folder, so you just keep working.
- Easy for beginners: every action has a button, and you can learn the shortcuts later. Hosts, history and snippets are all a click away.
An asterism is a pattern of stars people pick out apart from the official constellations, like the Big Dipper. Asterism groups your tabs by the host they connect to, like stars in a pattern.
More features
- Tabs grouped by host: it reads
~/.ssh/config(including# @groupand@colorcomments) and your Vagrant machines, and gives each connection its own color and group of tabs. - A drawer, not a sidebar: hosts, history, snippets and activity slide out from the right. The window grows, so your terminal keeps its width.
- History you can re-run: every command is recorded with its host, folder, exit code and time. Click ▶ to run it again on the host it came from (
Ctrl + Shift + H). - Snippets with blanks:
{{name:default}}turns a snippet into a small form with a live preview. - See what your AI agent runs: when an AI CLI starts child processes, the Activity drawer lists each one with its command, folder, time, CPU and exit code.
- Copy just the last output: shell integration knows where each output starts and ends, so
Ctrl + Shift + Ocopies exactly that. - Make it yours: pick a starry sky or aurora background and one of eight color schemes, or bring your own image and colors.
Demo
A simple demo that recreates the app in your browser. Switch hosts with the tabs at the top, and try splitting, history, snippets and activity. Nothing here connects anywhere.
The real app
Recorded from the real app on Windows 11 with sample hosts (no sound): connecting, running commands, splitting, history, the AI activity drawer and a theme change.
How it is built
It is built with Tauri (Rust) and xterm.js. Shells run through ConPTY, and PowerShell, cmd, Git Bash and WSL are detected automatically. The prompt and shell integration are loaded by Asterism when it starts a shell, so your .bashrc and profile are left alone.
Terminal history is full of server names, paths and the odd password, so history, snippets and settings stay on your PC, and commands that look like they contain a password or token are not recorded.
