COSMIC Terminal

COSMIC Terminal is the terminal emulator built for the COSMIC desktop environment by System76. Written entirely in Rust, it builds on the same battle-tested alacritty_terminal backend used by Alacritty for correctness and compatibility, while layering a custom renderer on top that adds ligature support and bidirectional text — capabilities Alacritty intentionally omits. It is pre-alpha software, actively developed alongside the rest of the COSMIC DE suite, and ships by default on Pop!_OS.

Features

• GPU-accelerated rendering — Custom renderer built with wgpu and glyphon for fast, modern GPU rendering; falls back to softbuffer + tiny-skia when no GPU is available.
• Ligature support — Renders programming ligatures correctly via cosmic-text, the same high-quality text shaping library used throughout the COSMIC desktop.
• Bidirectional text — Full BiDi support for right-to-left scripts alongside left-to-right terminal output.
• Multiple tabs — Open and manage multiple terminal sessions in a single window.
• Custom colour schemes — Import and switch colour schemes through the application menu.
• System theme integration — Automatically follows the COSMIC desktop dark/light theme preference.
• alacritty_terminal backend — Uses the same proven terminal emulation core as Alacritty, ensuring broad compatibility with terminal applications and escape sequences.
• All Rust, no Electron — The entire stack from terminal emulation to rendering is native Rust with no web runtime overhead.

Installation

COSMIC Terminal is pre-alpha and does not yet have stable binary releases outside of Pop!_OS. The recommended ways to obtain it are:

Pop!_OS (ships by default)

COSMIC Terminal is included in Pop!_OS 24.04 and later as the default terminal emulator. No additional installation steps are needed.

Build from source (all Linux distributions)

# Install Rust via rustup if you haven't already
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# Install system dependencies (Debian / Ubuntu)
sudo apt install just libxkbcommon-dev libwayland-dev libinput-dev \
    libdbus-1-dev pkg-config

# Install system dependencies (Fedora)
sudo dnf install just libxkbcommon-devel wayland-devel libinput-devel \
    dbus-devel pkg-config

# Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-term
cd cosmic-term
just build-release
just install

Arch Linux (AUR)

paru -S cosmic-term-git

Nix / NixOS

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.cosmic-term

Note: As pre-alpha software, the build dependencies and process may change between commits. Check the repository README for the most up-to-date instructions.

Quick Start

After launching COSMIC Terminal, it behaves like any standard terminal emulator. A few things worth knowing out of the box:

# Open a new tab
# Ctrl+Shift+T

# Close the current tab
# Ctrl+Shift+W

# Scroll up / down
# Shift+PageUp / Shift+PageDown

# Increase / decrease font size
# Ctrl+= / Ctrl+-

# Open settings and colour scheme picker
# Access via the hamburger menu (top-right)

To test ligature rendering, open any font that ships with ligatures (JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Cascadia Code) and type common programming tokens:

# These sequences should render as ligatures with a supporting font:
# -> => != == <= >= <!-- --> ::
echo "Ligature test: -> => != =="

Architecture

COSMIC Terminal is deliberately layered to separate concerns:

This architecture means COSMIC Terminal inherits Alacritty's terminal correctness while adding the rendering features (ligatures, BiDi) that Alacritty's maintainers have explicitly chosen not to support. The tradeoff is that cosmic-text adds complexity and the renderer is newer and less battle-tested than Alacritty's VTE-based pipeline.

COSMIC Terminal vs Other Rust Terminals

If you are not using the COSMIC desktop and want a stable Rust terminal with ligatures today, WezTerm or Rio are the closest alternatives. Alacritty remains the best choice for a minimal, maximally compatible terminal without ligatures.