con

The terminal emulator with AI harness, nothing more

Open source. GPU-accelerated. Terminal-first.

Built for SSH, tmux, and agent-native workflows.

Why con?

con is for people who want a serious terminal first and AI help only when it earns its place.

If you're an old-school terminal user and only want enough AI harness when needed, nothing more or less, con is for you.

What it does

• a terminal that is fast and elegant
• a built-in AI harness that can read context, ask before acting, and work directly in the terminal you can already see
• terminal-native workflows for CLI work, with ssh, tmux, and coding-agent-aware orchestration

Status

con is in active beta development.

• macOS fully supported, beta.
• Windows early beta. Tracker: #34.
• Linux preview. Tracker: #18.

Screenshot

View the full screenshot gallery

2 min know-how

con-demo.1.mp4

Quick controls:

Action	macOS	Windows / Linux
Switch focus between terminal and input	⌘ I	⌃ ⇧ I
Show or hide the bottom input bar	⌃ `	⌃ `
Show or hide the agent panel	⌘ L	⌃ ⇧ L
Cycle bottom-bar mode	⌘ ;	⌃ ;
Show or hide Quick Terminal	⌘ Backslash after enabling	Not available

• Smart mode decides whether your text is a shell command or an agent request.
• Command mode runs shell commands. With multiple panes, the pane mini map lets you choose the focused pane, all panes, or a selected set.
• Agent mode sends text directly to the built-in agent.

Quick Terminal is off by default. On macOS, enable its global shortcut in Settings -> Keys, or open it from the command palette / View menu while Con is frontmost.

Install

macOS, Homebrew

brew install --cask nowledge-co/tap/con-beta

This installs the app and exposes con-cli on your PATH for automation.

macOS

curl -fsSL https://con-releases.nowledge.co/install.sh | sh

This installs the app into /Applications and links con-cli into ~/.local/bin. Or download the DMG directly from Releases.

Linux (preview)

curl -fsSL https://con-releases.nowledge.co/install.sh | sh

This installs both con and con-cli into ~/.local/bin. Or download con-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz from the latest Release.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux users can install con via pacman -S con-bin or paru -S con-bin or yay -S con-bin .

Windows

irm https://con-releases.nowledge.co/install.ps1 | iex

This installs con-app.exe and con-cli.exe into the same PATH directory. Or download con-windows-x86_64.zip from the latest Release.

For Scoop users, here's how to install:

scoop bucket add jam https://github.com/EFLKumo/jam
scoop install jam/con-terminal

This will make con portable and add con-app and con-cli to your PATH.

To build from source, see HACKING.md.

Docs

Start here:

• Install: get con on macOS, Windows, or Linux.
• Quick controls: focus switching, agent panel, and command modes.
• Quick Terminal: set up the optional macOS drop-down terminal.
• Terminal workflows: tabs, panes, broadcast, pane zoom, links, and surfaces.
• Built-in agent: use AI help without leaving the terminal.
• Settings: choose providers, themes, suggestions, skills, and shortcuts.
• Skills and workflows: turn repeated terminal routines into project or personal slash commands.
• Workspace layout profiles: save a project layout, reopen it later, or share it with a team.
• con-cli and surfaces: build scripts, test runners, and external agent orchestrators on top of con.
• Screenshot gallery: a visual tour of the app.
• Release notes: what changed in each beta.

For contributors:

• Contributor quickstart: build, test, and release from source.
• Architecture: product direction and system design.
• docs/impl/ and docs/study/: implementation records and research notes.

License

MIT

Credits ♥️

con depends on upstream projects we rely on directly and respect deeply:

• Ghostty for the terminal runtime and rendering foundation that powers our embedded terminal surfaces.
• GPUI from the Zed team for the native GPU UI framework we build the shell on.
• gpui-component from the Longbridge team for the component library that accelerates much of the UI layer.
• Rig for the lovely Rust agent framework behind con's AI harness.
• Phosphor Icons for the icon system used across the app.
• Flexoki for the default visual theme direction.
• Iosevka and Ioskeley Mono for the mono type foundation used in terminal chrome and code-heavy UI.

con was initially inspired by warp.dev, but is doing less than warp, if you need more, you should go for warp instead.