Windows · Zig 0.15 · AGPL-3.0

F1 drops a terminal
right where you're working

A Quake-style drop-down terminal for Windows.
ghostty VT core, Direct3D 11 ClearType rendering, bundled OpenConsole ConPTY.

Fast, focused, native to Windows

Built around the things a drop-down terminal has to get right.

F1 global hotkey

Drop down from any app with one key. Press again to hide. Alt+Enter toggles monitor fullscreen.

📑

Tabs, drag, rename

Ctrl+Shift+T to open, Alt+1–9 to switch, drag to reorder, double-click the tab to rename.

🎨

D3D11 ClearType rendering

DirectWrite glyph atlas + HLSL dual-source blending. Subpixel anti-aliasing that actually survives.

🚀

Bundled OpenConsole (2.2×)

Ships Microsoft's ConPTY runtime so conhost is out of the path. Bulk output throughput more than doubles.

🖥️

Multi-monitor, DPI-aware

Drops onto whichever monitor the cursor is on. Reacts instantly to resolution, DPI, and taskbar changes.

🌏

Unicode, CJK, emoji

Correct wide-character rendering out of the box. Font fallback chain up to 8 deep — no tofu.

🎭

18 built-in themes

Ghostty, Windows Terminal, Dracula, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night and more. COLORFGBG is set automatically so vim picks the right scheme.

🪟

Translucent, always on top

Docks to any screen edge (top/bottom/left/right). Size and offset are specified as percentages of the monitor.

📋

Select to copy

Drag to select, release to copy. Double-click for word, middle-click to paste.

Quick start

1

Download

Grab tildaz-vX.Y.Z-win-x64.zip from the Releases page.

Releases →
2

Extract

Unzip anywhere. Keep tildaz.exe, conpty.dll, and OpenConsole.exe together — the bundled ConPTY runtime only activates when all three sit in the same folder.

3

Run and hit F1

First launch writes %APPDATA%\tildaz\config.json with defaults. Shell, theme, font, and drop-down geometry live there.

Heads up on EDR false positives: the current tildaz.exe is not yet Authenticode-signed. Some endpoint security products (SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, etc.) flag unsigned ConPTY-spawning binaries by behavior alone. Code signing via the SignPath Foundation OSS program is in progress. Details →

Build it yourself

Install Zig 0.15.2 and you're one command away.

# default — ReleaseFast
zig build

# debug
zig build -Doptimize=Debug

# release zip + SHA256
zig build package