Documentation
How toowl compares
Where toowl sits next to iTerm2, Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, and Alacritty — and what makes it different.
The modern terminal field is excellent. iTerm2, Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, and Alacritty are all fast, well-built, and beloved. toowl isn't trying to beat any one of them on a single axis — it's trying to put a specific combination in a single binary that you otherwise have to assemble from a terminal plus tmux plus a web gateway plus an editor extension.
At a glance
| 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.
What's genuinely different
- The daemon owns your work, not the window. Close a toowl
workspace window and the sessions keep running inside
toowld; reopen to reattach. tmux gives you this in a text grid — toowl gives it to you with GPU rendering, native windows, and the same model over SSH. - Two clients, one binary. The same
toowlyou run on your laptop becomes a tmux-style crossterm client when you launch it over SSH on a headless box — talking to the daemon over a Unix socket, SSH-stdio, or WebSocket. - Remote machines are first-class. Switch between local and
remote daemons from the GUI Perch, the TUI (Ctrl+B m), or a web
page — remote workspaces look identical with an
@hostbadge. - Open a session in a browser. Hand a teammate (or your phone) a scoped, expiring URL to a live session — no other terminal here does this out of the box.
- Claude on the Perch. The Claude Feather ships in the free build: your Claude Code sessions, resumable and crash-recoverable, in the sidebar and command palette.
Where the others shine
Credit where due. Kitty's graphics protocol and kittens are superb (and toowl implements that protocol). WezTerm's Lua configurability and multiplexer are deep. Ghostty's native feel and standards rigor are excellent. Alacritty is a model of minimal, rock-solid speed. iTerm2 has a decade of macOS polish. If you want exactly one of those strengths, those projects are the right call — toowl's bet is that the daemon + remote TUI + Feathers + Claude bundle is worth having together.