v0.8.0 · Underlines, italics, and faster emoji Underlines, strikethrough, overline, blink, and real italic and bold faces now render, a new tab opens in the active tab's directory, and emoji- and CJK-heavy output draws far faster.

Release Notes

Why TildaZ

The drop-down workflow people love, rebuilt for the desktops they actually use.

Instant

One key between thought and shell

Drop the terminal over your current workspace, run the command, and hide it again before your flow cools off.

Linux

Wayland coverage that matters

KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, COSMIC, Hyprland, and sway get real drop-down placement and global hotkey paths.

Everywhere

Same reflex, every OS

Keep one JSON config shape and one muscle memory across Linux, macOS, and Windows while each host still behaves natively.

Native

Native where it counts

Direct Wayland, AppKit + Metal, Win32 + Direct3D, and the fast libghostty-vt core. No Electron runtime.

Unicode

Pretty TUIs, serious text

True color, ligatures, color emoji, procedural box-drawing, smooth shaded blocks, and inline IME for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

Yours

Personal, not nosy

Tabs, drag reorder, shell-driven titles, JSON themes, local config, local logs, and zero telemetry or analytics.

Find It Fast

If you searched for any of these, you are in the right place.

Tilda alternative A native drop-down terminal in the spirit of Tilda, but designed for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Guake / Yakuake-style terminal The same one-hotkey, show-and-hide workflow without being limited to one Linux desktop.

Cross-platform terminal config Paths differ by OS, but the JSON schema, themes, hotkey, font, shell, opacity, and geometry settings stay familiar.

Wayland drop-down terminal Direct Wayland integration across KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, COSMIC, Hyprland, and sway.

Linux

Every major Wayland desktop

A direct Wayland client with no GTK or Qt runtime dependency. Real drop-down placement and global hotkey paths across major desktops, with package formats for common Linux distribution families.

KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, COSMIC, Hyprland, sway
Fractional / HiDPI scaling, fcitx5 / IME support
tar.gz · deb · rpm · AppImage · Arch pkg (x86_64 / aarch64)

macOS

Native, Retina-sharp

Built on AppKit and Metal with full IME composition, candidate anchoring, and Hanja / kanji reconversion. Universal Apple Silicon + Intel.

Retina glyph rendering
Universal app bundle
Cursor-following drop-down on any display

Windows

Fast, native, bundled

GPU-accelerated rendering with a bundled Microsoft OpenConsole runtime for a consistent, modern terminal — x64 and ARM64.

Crisp ClearType glyph rendering
Bundled ConPTY for reliable shells
Win32 global hotkey and native window behavior

Measured

Numbers, not adjectives.

How much output TildaZ swallows per second when 64 MiB is poured into a 120x40 grid — parsed and drawn, end to end, in MiB/s. Higher is faster.

Workload	Linux Intel Core i5-1240P · KDE Plasma	macOS Apple M5 Pro · MacBook Pro	Windows Intel Core i5-1240P · Windows 11
Plain ASCII	126.2	131.6	177.6
ANSI color escapes	56.7	142.7	65.2
Hangul, wide cells	75.4	128.3	83.1
Mixed CJK and emoji	31.2	115.6	46.8
Emoji with VS-16	13.5	36.8	15.5
ZWJ emoji sequences	20.1	46.9	21.7

Read each column on its own. Linux and Windows are the same dual-boot laptop, so those two columns differ only in host implementation. macOS is a different machine, so reading straight across a row mixes in a CPU difference.
Built ReleaseFast with SIMD. Each run pours 64 MiB into a 120x40 grid with a 32,767-line scrollback on AC power, and every figure is the trimmed mean of five runs. The macOS column is v0.8.0; the Linux and Windows columns are later builds that include the fixes below, and each column's six figures come from a single session.
Linux is faster than the figures we first published. Its drain loop only woke on frame callbacks, so throughput scaled inversely with the display refresh rate. Issue #436 lets it carry straight on whenever output is still queued: re-measuring the same laptop moved ANSI from 22.9 to 56.7 MiB/s. Five of the six workloads gained between 1.5x and 2.5x. Plain ASCII was never held by that wait, and its before and after runs overlap, so we count it as unchanged.
Windows ANSI is fixed. It used to land on one of two speeds from run to run, because the Direct3D present call held the thread that parses output. Issue #435 replaced it with a waitable swap chain: ANSI went 37.3 to 65.2 MiB/s, and the spread across five runs fell from 214% to 8%. macOS was never affected.
Harness, workloads, and the full method: dist/stress.

Get Started

Download, install, press F1.

Download

Grab the latest GitHub Release for your OS: a Linux package (deb / rpm / AppImage / Arch / tar.gz), macOS DMG, or Windows zip.

Install

Linux: install the package or run ./install.sh from the tarball. macOS: drag the app into Applications. Windows: unzip and run.

Press F1

Drop the terminal down with the hotkey. Tweak config_0.json for shell, theme, font, hotkey, opacity, and geometry. Launch TildaZ again to add another independently configured instance.

Docs when you want to tune it.

InstallDownload choices and first launch by platform ConfigOne JSON config shape across Linux, macOS, and Windows Linux WaylandDesktop coverage, packages, scaling, and IME support CONFIG.mdSchema, themes, defaults, and examples KEYBINDINGS.mdKeyboard and mouse shortcuts Latest ReleaseDownload packages and read what changed