con

The terminal emulator with AI harness, nothing more

Open source. GPU-accelerated. Terminal-first.

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

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.

• 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

Use con as a shared terminal workspace for Claude Code, Codex, and other CLI agents. Install the con-terminal skill into your coding agent:

npx skills add nowledge-co/con-terminal --skill con-terminal

con and its companion con-cli must already be installed. The skill helps an agent inspect the existing workspace, run commands visibly, and coordinate workers without taking over your terminal.

• Parallel implementation: give each writer a worktree, put workers in surfaces inside one worker pane, then review and integrate their diffs.
• Review and verification: let one agent review while another runs checks; keep reports and logs available in their terminal sessions.
• Resume after restart: normal Claude Code and Codex launches link to their surfaces automatically in macOS/zsh and reopen their exact conversations after a restart. Automatic recovery is on by default and can be disabled in Settings. See native agent sessions.
• Continue in another agent: use supported Agent Handoff on macOS to carry context forward; coordinate writers because handoff shares the worktree.

A pane is visible layout; a surface is a specific terminal session. Agents address workers by surface ID, observe fresh OSC 7501 reports when available, and verify outputs before declaring success. Programs without status reporting still work; silence is never treated as completion.

See the workflow and CLI guide for examples, program status for report semantics, and the skill for agent instructions.

con is in active beta development.

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

View the full screenshot gallery

• 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.

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, official installer)

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 / AUR (community)

yay -S con-bin

con-bin is maintained on AUR by czyt. paru -S con-bin works too. Use the official installer above if you need the newest beta immediately after a release.

Windows (official installer)

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.

Windows / Scoop (community)

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

The Scoop manifest is maintained by EFLKumo in the jam bucket. It installs a portable Con and adds con-app and con-cli to your PATH.

To build from source, see HACKING.md.

Start here:

• Install: get con on macOS, Windows, or Linux.
• Configuration reference: configure Ghostty terminal settings and Con-specific behavior in con.conf (con-terminal.conf on Windows).
• 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.

MIT

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.