Ashy Terminal

A modern GTK4 / libadwaita terminal emulator with SSH session management, an integrated file manager and smart output highlighting.

Features • Installation • Usage • Configuration • Contributing

Ashy Terminal is a terminal built with GTK4 and Adwaita for Linux desktops. It covers what developers and system administrators expect — SSH sessions, split panes, tab groups, remote file transfer — and it also makes the command line friendlier for newcomers by colorizing command output automatically, without touching your shell configuration.

It ships as the default terminal on BigLinux and BigCommunity.

Features

Sessions and SSH

• Session manager — save Local, SSH and SFTP sessions, organize them in folders, color-code their tabs and search them from the sidebar.
• SSH done right — key or password authentication (passwords stored in GNOME Keyring / KWallet via libsecret), ControlMaster connection reuse, ProxyJump, port forwarding, X11 forwarding and post-login commands.
• ~/.ssh/config import — hosts from your SSH config show up automatically.
• Quick connect — ashyterm --ssh user@host or the quick-connect action.

Smart output highlighting

Colors are applied inside Ashy Terminal, not by your shell — no changes to .bashrc / .zshrc needed. That makes it just as useful on servers, containers and restricted environments where you can't customize the shell.

• Command-aware rules — 50+ rule sets applied automatically for tools such as ping, docker, systemctl, ip, lsblk, git, kubectl and more.
• Pattern highlighting — IP addresses, UUIDs, URLs, errors and warnings stand out in any output.
• cat with syntax highlighting — source files printed with cat are colorized via Pygments.
• Live input highlighting — commands are colorized as you type (optional).

Built-in color schemes, all editable	Per-command rules you can toggle, edit or add

Every rule is customizable: foreground and background colors, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and blinking text for critical information.

Split panes and tab groups

• Split panes horizontally and vertically, maximize a single pane and rebalance them; save and restore complete layouts.
• Tab groups — Chrome-style color-coded groups that can be collapsed, reordered by drag and drop, and auto-joined.
• Live directory tracking — tab titles follow the current working directory (OSC 7), with the full path in the tooltip.

• Input broadcasting — type a command once and send it to several tabs and panes at the same time.

Integrated file manager

• Side panel that follows the terminal — browse local and remote (SFTP) file systems; it tracks the shell's current directory.
• Remote editing — open a remote file in your local editor; Ashy watches it and uploads every save.
• Drag and drop transfers — drop files on the terminal to upload them to the remote host (rsync when available, SFTP otherwise).
• Transfer manager — progress and history for uploads and downloads.

Command manager

Ready-to-use command forms (compress, extract, find files, journalctl, pacman, systemctl, …) for people who don't remember every flag — and you can add your own.

Optional AI assistant

A fully opt-in side panel that connects your terminal to an LLM. Nothing is sent unless you explicitly select text and ask for it.

• Providers: Groq, Google Gemini, OpenRouter and local models (Ollama, LM Studio).
• Distribution-aware answers, persistent chat history and click-to-run command suggestions.

Deep customization

Fonts, line spacing, terminal and headerbar transparency, cursor, scrollback, scroll sensitivity, icon theme, tab appearance and fully configurable keyboard shortcuts. Settings and sessions can be exported to an encrypted 7z backup.

Installation

BigLinux / BigCommunity

Ashy Terminal comes pre-installed as the default terminal. Nothing to do.

Arch Linux / Manjaro (build from source)

libchildenv is optional but recommended for long sessions. It enables allocator preloading (mimalloc/tcmalloc/jemalloc) and removes LD_PRELOAD from child processes, so terminal commands do not inherit the custom allocator. Without it, Ashy skips the memory optimization even if mimalloc is installed.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git

# Recommended: keeps Ashy's memory usage stable in long sessions
git clone https://github.com/biglinux/libchildenv.git
cd libchildenv/pkgbuild && makepkg -si && cd ../..

git clone https://github.com/big-comm/ashyterm.git
cd ashyterm/pkgbuild
makepkg -si

Nix

# Run without cloning
nix run github:big-comm/ashyterm

# Variant with all optional dependencies
# (also available: ashyterm-performance, ashyterm-highlighting, ashyterm-backup)
nix run github:big-comm/ashyterm#ashyterm-all

# Development shell from a local clone
nix develop
python -m ashyterm

Package	Extra dependencies	Description
ashyterm	—	Base terminal emulator
ashyterm-performance	regex	Faster highlighting regex engine
ashyterm-highlighting	Pygments	Syntax highlighting support
ashyterm-backup	py7zr	Encrypted 7z backup / restore
ashyterm-all	all of the above	Every optional dependency

Run from source

git clone https://github.com/big-comm/ashyterm.git
cd ashyterm

# Run without installing
PYTHONPATH="$PWD/src" python -m ashyterm

# Or install for the current user
python -m pip install --user .
ashyterm

Dependencies

Type	Packages
Runtime	Python 3.8+, GTK 4, libadwaita 1, VTE for GTK4 (vte4), PyGObject, pycairo, libsecret
Python	requests, psutil, setproctitle, regex, Pygments, py7zr, asyncssh
Tools	openssh, rsync (fast transfers, falls back to SFTP), sshpass (only for SSH password auth)

On Arch / Manjaro:

sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita vte4 libsecret python-gobject python-cairo python-requests \
  python-psutil python-setproctitle python-regex python-pygments python-py7zr \
  python-asyncssh openssh rsync sshpass

Usage

ashyterm [OPTIONS] [DIRECTORY]

Option	Description
-w, --working-directory DIR	Working directory for the initial terminal
-e, -x, --execute COMMAND ...	Execute a command on startup (all remaining arguments are included)
--close-after-execute	Close the tab when the command finishes
--ssh [USER@]HOST[:PORT][:/PATH]	Connect straight to an SSH host
--new-window	Open a new window instead of a tab
-d, --debug	Enable debug mode
--log-level LEVEL	DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR or CRITICAL
-v, --version / -h, --help	Show version / help

ashyterm ~/projects                         # open in a directory
ashyterm -e htop                            # run a command
ashyterm --ssh admin@server.example.com     # connect over SSH
ashyterm --close-after-execute -e "ls -la"  # run and close

Configuration

Everything lives in ~/.config/ashyterm/:

Path	Contents
settings.json	Preferences, appearance, terminal behavior, shortcuts and AI settings
sessions.json	Saved sessions and folders
session_state.json	Window state and session restore data
layouts/	Saved split-pane layouts
highlights/	Your custom highlighting rules (bundled rules live in data/highlights/)
backups/	Encrypted backup archives
logs/	Application logs (when logging to file is enabled)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

1. Fork the repository and create a branch: git checkout -b feature/my-feature
2. Make your change and run the test suite: pytest tests/ -q
3. Commit, push and open a Pull Request.

See AGENTS.md for the project layout and coding conventions.

License

Released under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

• The BigCommunity and BigLinux teams.
• The developers of GNOME, GTK, VTE and Pygments.