GPU-fast, idle-quiet
A wgpu renderer that draws only when something changes — <80ms cold start, ~80MB at rest, and a cursor that glides at your display's refresh rate but costs nothing when you're reading.
v1.0 — Claude on Perch, day one
Terminal You Will Love.
toowl · pronounced /tuːl/ — like “tool”. The owl is just here for moral support.
A GPU-fast desktop terminal and a tmux-style remote client in one binary — with daemon-backed workspaces and Claude on the Perch.
$ curl -fsSL https://toowl.dev/install.sh | sh Open source. Free forever. macOS · Linux · Windows.
toowl is pronounced like the word "tool", and rhymes with "cool".
Watch the tour 90-second walkthrough — coming soon
<80ms
Cold start
First frame on Apple Silicon
~80MB
Idle memory
No always-on redraw
120fps
Smooth-glide cursor
Where the display allows; 0fps when idle
1 binary
GUI + TUI
Auto-detects desktop vs headless
29
Focused crates
No cycles, edition 2024
17
Built-in themes
Plus your own in config.toml
First feather on the Perch
Claude on the Perch.
Open the Perch (cmd-B). The Claude Feather is already there — your Claude Code sessions, resumable, crash-recoverable, palette-integrated. No setup, no detour through a browser. (Bring your own claude binary; the Feather handles the rest.)
- Resume any session Every Claude Code conversation in this directory shows on the Perch, one click away.
- Crash recovery, built in When Claude goes down mid-task, the Feather detects it and offers a one-key restart. Your context survives.
- Palette-integrated Cmd-Shift-P opens Claude commands alongside terminal actions. One muscle memory, two superpowers.
The Claude Feather is built on toowl's first-party
toowl-plugin-claude. Shipped, tested, in this binary.
Real UI — the Perch, the crash banner, palette integration. All in v1.0.
Breakthroughs, not bullet points
The handful of things toowl does that no other terminal puts in one binary.
Daemon-backed workspaces
Named workspaces are owned by toowld, not the window. Close the window to detach; reopen to reattach — sessions keep running. Local or remote, same UI with an @host badge.
Two clients, one binary
The same binary is a GPU desktop app on your laptop and a tmux-style crossterm client over SSH — talking to the daemon over a Unix socket, SSH-stdio, or WebSocket.
Claude on the Perch
Open the sidebar and the Claude Feather is already there: your Claude Code sessions, resumable and crash-recoverable, integrated into the command palette. No browser detour.
Why toowl?
A terminal that respects your taste — and your CPU.
-
Native speed
GPU-accelerated wgpu renderer. 120fps where supported. Zero input latency you can feel.
-
Beautiful by default
Toowl Sepia out of the box. Smooth-glide cursor, translucent window, ligatures, color emoji.
-
The Claude Feather
Sessions, crash recovery, and palette integration ship in v1.0. Bring your own claude binary — the Feather handles the rest.
-
Feathers ecosystem
Extensions are 'feathers'. In-process or subprocess, capability-gated, hot-installable. Build your own; publish to the Aviary (soon).
-
Cross-platform
macOS, Linux, Windows. One binary, same experience. Native chrome where the OS allows.
-
Open source
MIT or Apache-2.0. Built in the open. Tests, CI, plans, and design docs all public.
One daemon. Every client.
Your sessions live in toowld, not the window. Attach from
the desktop app, a tmux-style TUI over SSH, or a browser — local or
across the world, same UI.
Install your way
Three paths, same outcome. Pick the one your environment already loves.
$ curl -fsSL https://toowl.dev/install.sh | sh Detects your OS + arch, downloads the matching binary from GitHub Releases, verifies the SHA256, installs to ~/.toowl/bin/toowl. ~5 seconds on a fresh machine.
$ brew install 1martianway/tap/toowl Installs from toowl's Homebrew tap. Auto-updates via brew upgrade. Use this if you already manage tools with brew.
$ cargo install --git https://github.com/1martianway/toowl toowl-app Requires Rust 1.95+. Slow first build (~3 min compile), no pre-built binary needed. Use this if you want HEAD or are on an unsupported arch.
Supported on
Pre-built binaries ship for Linux (x86_64 +
aarch64) with every v1.0.36+ release;
macOS and Windows build from source
via Homebrew or cargo.
Star the repo to get
notified the moment more land.
macOS
Linux
Windows
How toowl compares
Plenty of terminals are fast. toowl is the one that also hands you a daemon, a remote TUI, a plugin ecosystem, and Claude — in one binary.
| Feature | toowl | iTerm2 | Kitty | WezTerm | Ghostty | Alacritty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU-accelerated rendering | ||||||
| Daemon-backed named workspaces (detach/reattach) | ||||||
| tmux-style TUI client in the same binary | ||||||
| Remote daemons over SSH / WebSocket | ||||||
| Plugin / extension system | ||||||
| Built-in AI / Claude Code integration | ||||||
| Open a session in the browser | ||||||
| Open source | ||||||
| macOS · Linux · Windows | macOS |
Compiled from each project's public docs, mid-2026. "Partial" means a related capability exists in a different shape — e.g. tmux integration, a config-side scripting hook, or a separate companion tool. Corrections welcome on GitHub.
Ready to give your terminal a glow-up?
It takes one command. We'll wait.
$ curl -fsSL https://toowl.dev/install.sh | sh