NexTerm

The modern, AI-powered terminal and code editor for Windows — free, private, and built from scratch.

🤖 AI chat + ghost-text autocomplete · Built-in code editor (Monaco) with project mode · SSH/SFTP · Multi-window · 19 themes · Workspaces — all in one installer.

A daily-driver Windows terminal that pulls in the best ideas from iTerm2, Windows Terminal, Warp, and Tabby — and ships them all for free in a single installer.

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📸 Screenshots

Default view — ASCII banner, system info, Material Ocean theme, command timer, status bar

Multiple shells PowerShell, CMD, Git Bash, WSL, Zsh & Fish via WSL, Scratchpad	Command history Cross-shell, scoped to folder / subdirs / all, click to re-run
SSH Profiles Tunnels (-L/-R/-D), jump-host chains, auto-reconnect	Pane splits Side-by-side / top-bottom; broadcast input across all
19 themes Tokyo Night, Dracula, Gruvbox, Solarized, Material Ocean…	Window settings Status bar, mini-map, animated banner, Quake mode, etc.
Terminal settings Scrollback, banner, paste warnings, ASCII logo picker	Font settings Family, size, line height, cursor style + live preview

Every preference is just JSON — open it, edit by hand, share, back up, or import a friend's config

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✨ Quick install

Pick the installer that fits your setup from the Releases page:

Installer	Size	Best for
NexTerm-Setup-x.y.z.exe (slim)	~125 MB	Default. CPU AI runs out of the box; on first launch NexTerm detects your GPU and downloads the matching CUDA/Vulkan runtime on demand.
NexTerm-Setup-x.y.z-offline.exe (offline)	~306 MB	Air-gapped or no-internet installs. Ships every GPU runtime variant inside the installer so AI works offline immediately.

1. Run the installer (no admin rights required for per-user install).
2. The finish page has a checkbox: "Add nexterm CLI + Explorer right-click menu" — leave it on for the best experience.
3. Launch NexTerm from the Start Menu.

Windows 10/11, x64. The installer is multi-step (Welcome → License → Install dir → Finish) with the NexTerm logo on the wizard sidebar.

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🎯 Why NexTerm?

Most "free" Windows terminals are either bare-bones or have feature paywalls hiding behind subscriptions. NexTerm bundles everything serious developers actually use — SSH profiles, SFTP, port forwarding, jump-hosts, broadcast input, session recording — into one installer. No accounts. No telemetry. No ads.

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🆕 What's new in 0.4.1

Feature	What it does
🎙️ Voice input	Tap the mic in the AI chat to dictate your prompt. Records locally via MediaRecorder, then transcribes through Groq's free Whisper Turbo endpoint — fast, accurate, no extra setup beyond a Groq API key.
🔍 File compare view	Side-by-side or inline diff between any two files in your project. Pick a base, pick a comparison, get a Monaco DiffEditor with word-wrap toggle. Esc to close.
🛠️ Format-on-save	Automatically pipes the file through the right formatter on save: Prettier (JS/TS/JSON/HTML/CSS), Black/Ruff (Python), gofmt (Go), rustfmt (Rust), clang-format (C/C++), Dart format. Falls back to Monaco's built-in if no external tool is installed.
💡 LSP framework	Real IntelliSense for Python (pyright), Go (gopls), Rust (rust-analyzer), C# (omnisharp). Servers spawn on first file open and feed Monaco's completion + hover providers.
↶ Undo last AI edit	Every Read/Edit/Write/Bash tool call from the AI gets recorded with before/after snapshots. One-click undo to roll back the last change — or any earlier one — from inside the chat.
🪟 Detached AI chat	Pop the chat panel out into its own window for a dedicated assistant view. Re-attach button pulls the conversation back into the originating NexTerm window, history intact.
📋 Inline tool cards	When the AI agent edits files, you see auto-expanded diff cards inline in the chat — green/red lines, fullscreen toggle, no need to flip to the editor.
⌨️ Slash commands	/clear, /export, /tokens, /compact, /undo, /help in the chat composer. Token-count pill in the header tracks running context size.
🪄 Composer polish	Auto-growing textarea up to 10 lines, single rounded box with divider line, hover-revealed undo on past prompts, system-prompt template picker, @-mention reference picker.
🧠 Recently closed tabs	Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last closed editor tab (ring buffer of 10 — VS Code-style).

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🚀 Features

🧑‍💻 Coder Mode — open & edit projects right inside NexTerm

NexTerm isn't just a terminal anymore. Open any folder as a project and you get a real code editor (Monaco — the engine behind VS Code) alongside the terminal.

How to open a project

• Tab bar ▾ arrow → Coder mode → Open Project… (folder picker)
• Or from the File menu in editor mode

What you get

• Monaco editor — full-feature code editing with syntax highlighting for 70+ languages out of the box (TS, JS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++, C#, Ruby, PHP, Shell, PowerShell, YAML, SQL, Markdown, HTML, CSS, etc.) plus a built-in Dart tokenizer for Flutter projects
• File tree sidebar — project name on top, compact icon buttons for new file / new folder / refresh; inline rename and inline create (no broken prompt() dialogs)
• Multi-file tabs — open many files, dirty • indicator on unsaved changes, Ctrl+S to save, confirm before closing unsaved
• Bottom-sheet terminal (Ctrl+`) — VS Code-style terminal panel slides up at the bottom of the editor with cwd already set to your project root. Drag the divider to resize.
• VS Code-style top menu — File / Edit / View / Terminal / Project / AI / Help. Only appears in editor mode.
• Theme-aware Monaco — editor colors pick up your active NexTerm theme automatically
• Auto-save (optional) — saves dirty files after an idle pause; per-file dirty tracking persists across tab switches
• Separate font sizes for code (Monaco) and tree/tabs so you can have small chrome with large code, or vice versa
• Watch-on-disk — outside edits (git pull, etc.) refresh the tree automatically
• Hide tab bar in Coder mode (default ON) — editor uses the full vertical height; toggle in View menu or Settings → Coder

No VS Code extensions — NexTerm uses Monaco directly, not the proprietary VS Code extension host. We add languages, themes, and snippets via Monarch grammars.

🪟 Multi-window

• Open Project in New Window (default) — opens the project in a brand-new NexTerm window, leaving your current terminal tabs untouched. Toggle in Settings → Coder.
• File → New Window — fresh blank NexTerm window
• Project → Move Current Tab to New Window — pop the active tab out
• Each window has its own tabs and state. Settings, AI history, profiles, vault are shared across windows.

🤖 AI Assistant — chat, autocomplete, and explain

NexTerm has a side-panel AI chat that knows what's on your terminal. Press Ctrl+Shift+A anywhere → chat panel slides in next to your shells, resizing the terminal area (it doesn't overlay).

What it does

• Streaming responses — tokens stream into the chat as the model generates them, with a Stop button to cancel mid-response
• Sees your terminal automatically — captures the last 30 lines of your active pane on demand (auto-disabled when you attach a file so the file gets full attention)
• Conversational memory — every chat is saved to a local SQLite database
• History dropdown — resume any previous conversation, rename, delete; full search across all chats
• Code-block actions — every code fence gets Copy / Insert / ▶ Run buttons. One click and the suggested command lands in your terminal
• Attach files for context — text, code, log, config, PDFs (parsed via pdfjs), and images (with multimodal models — Gemini, Groq vision, OpenRouter vision). Up to 2 MB per file.
• Auto-failover between providers — if Groq rate-limits, the chat silently retries with Gemini, Cerebras, or OpenRouter (whichever has a key in the vault). Only kicks in on 429/quota errors — auth or model errors still surface.
• Smart model fallback — if your saved model name doesn't match the selected provider, NexTerm uses the provider's default automatically (no more "model not found" after switching providers)
• Resizable side panel + fullscreen toggle

👻 Ghost-text autocomplete (local-only, free, private)

As you type a command in any pane, a small local AI model predicts the rest of the line. Press Tab to accept the suggestion. Press anything else to dismiss.

• Local Ollama only — nothing ever leaves your machine, no API calls, no quotas
• Default model: qwen2.5-coder:1.5b (~1 GB, fast on CPU). Override in Settings → AI.
• Debounced — only fires after you pause typing, configurable (default 400ms)
• Off by default — turn on in Settings → AI → Ghost-text autocomplete

Three ways to run the chat model, all free

Mode	What it is	Setup	Privacy
☁ Cloud (free tiers)	Groq, Gemini, Cerebras, OpenRouter — all offer free, no-credit-card tiers	Paste a free API key	Prompt + cwd sent to provider
💻 Local (Ollama)	Runs Llama, Qwen, Mistral, Gemma on your own machine	One-click auto-install of Ollama + one-click model pull from inside Settings	100% on-device
🛠 Right-click → ✨ Explain & Fix	Selects the last failing command + output, AI explains and offers a runnable fix	Same as above	Same as above

API keys never touch settings.json — they're encrypted with DPAPI (Electron safeStorage) and stored in NexTerm's vault.

Hardware-aware — Settings → AI detects your CPU/RAM/GPU and recommends the right model tier so a low-end laptop doesn't waste hours pulling a 70B model that won't run.

Privacy controls — toggle individual context bits (cwd, last command, redact env vars, redact home path). Local mode never sends anything off your machine.

🪟 Window & UX

• Tabs and splits — drag-to-reorder, pin tabs, color-code per project, close protection on multi-tab close
• Pane splits — vertical (Ctrl+Shift+D) and horizontal (Ctrl+Shift+E) inside any tab
• Quake mode — global hotkey slides NexTerm down from the top of your screen, like a classic FPS console
• Drag-drop files — drop any file onto a pane to paste its quoted path; auto-converts C:\… → /mnt/c/… for WSL panes
• "Open in NexTerm here" — Windows Explorer right-click integration (per-user, no admin)
• Status bar — current cwd, git branch + dirty marker, broadcast indicator, clock
• 12 window-control styles (Windows / macOS-mimic / minimal / glass / liquid / etc.)

🐚 Shells

• PowerShell 7 / 5, CMD, Git Bash, WSL — first-class support for all
• WSL distro install panel — if you pick WSL with no distro, NexTerm offers to install Ubuntu or Debian inline
• Zsh / Fish via WSL — and if those binaries aren't in your distro, NexTerm offers sudo apt install inline
• PowerShell init injection — banners, aliases, bookmarks, OSC 7 cwd tracking, all baked in
• Auto-fallback — if your default shell is missing on disk, NexTerm picks a working one without crashing

🌐 SSH & Remote

• SSH profiles — host, port, username, identity file, extra args
• Port forwarding UI — -L/-R/-D rows you flip on/off without memorizing flags
• Jump-host chains — define proxyJump per profile; NexTerm builds the -J user@bastion,… argument for you
• Auto-reconnect — exponential backoff (1s → 30s, 8 tries) when an SSH session drops
• SFTP side panel — open an SSH tab and press Ctrl+Shift+B. File browser slides in: navigate, drag-drop upload from OS, download, delete. Built on ssh2

📼 Productivity

• Command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) — fuzzy-pick any action
• Session record/replay — record any tab to a .cast file (asciinema v2 compatible). Replay to any pane with original timing. Share with asciinema-player or GitHub READMEs
• Snippet library (Ctrl+Shift+I) — saved command fragments with ${name:default} placeholders. Fuzzy-pick → fill in params → paste
• Find across all tabs (Ctrl+Shift+F) — searches every open pane's scrollback. Click a result → switches tab + scrolls to line
• Save terminal output (Ctrl+Shift+S) — dump scrollback to a .txt file
• Long-command notifications — system toast when commands take > 30s and the window isn't focused
• Command timer — every PowerShell prompt shows [1.2s] for the previous command
• Smart cd history — type cd nx → fuzzy-jumps to your most-frequented dir matching nx (zoxide-style, no install)
• Scratchpad pane — non-shell text pane for notes that survive across sessions
• .nexterm.yml workspaces — drop a workspace file in any folder; NexTerm spawns N tabs (cwd + auto-run command) on open
• Broadcast input — type into one pane, mirror keystrokes to every pane in the tab (great for fleet SSH)
• Multi-cursor lite (Ctrl+D) — make a selection, press Ctrl+D to jump to next occurrence

🎨 Visual & Themes

• 19 built-in themes — Tokyo Night, Dracula, Gruvbox, Solarized, GitHub, Nord, One Dark, etc.
• Live theme tweaks — override any background / foreground / cursor / selection color
• Inline images — Sixel + iTerm2 image protocol via @xterm/addon-image
• Hover cards on URLs — hover a link → small card with host + page <title>
• Mini-map gutter — right-edge minimap of scrollback. Click to jump. Lines matching error/fail/exception glow red
• Animated banner — typed-in figlet logo with neon glow on every new tab
• Background image / blur — Mica, Acrylic, Tabbed (Win11), or upload your own image with adjustable dim
• Custom logos — pick from 12 built-in ASCII logos or render your own text in figlet
• Wheel zoom — Ctrl+Scroll for font, Ctrl+Shift+Scroll for window opacity

🔐 Security & Storage

• Secrets vault — encrypted with Electron safeStorage (DPAPI under the hood). Inject as env vars at PTY spawn
• Per-project aliases — define aliases that only activate inside specific paths
• Directory bookmarks — goto <name> from PowerShell jumps to the bookmarked path
• Local SQLite — history, profiles, secrets all in %APPDATA%\NexTerm\nexterm.db. Yours, never sent anywhere
• Admin Mode toggle — flip between user and elevated mode without restarting; UAC handles the prompt

🔍 History & Search

• Cross-shell history — every command from every tab in one searchable list
• Per-folder scope — filter history to current cwd, current cwd + subdirs, or all
• Click-to-run — pick any past command and re-run in the active pane

⚙️ Customizable

• All shortcuts rebindable — Ctrl+T, Ctrl+Shift+W, Ctrl+F, Ctrl+H, Ctrl+,, Ctrl+Shift+I/B/F/S, etc.
• Settings export/import — share your full setup as JSON
• Run on Windows startup — opt-in
• Run in background — close to system tray, restore instantly

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⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts (defaults)

Action	Shortcut
New tab	Ctrl+T
Close pane / tab	Ctrl+Shift+W
Split right / down	Ctrl+Shift+D / Ctrl+Shift+E
Next / previous tab	Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Jump to tab N	Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+9
Command palette	Ctrl+Shift+P
AI Chat panel	Ctrl+Shift+A
Snippets	Ctrl+Alt+S
Open Project (Coder mode)	Ctrl+Shift+O (in editor menu)
New NexTerm window	Ctrl+Shift+N (in editor menu)
Save current file (Coder)	Ctrl+S
Toggle bottom terminal (Coder)	Ctrl+`
Close current file tab (Coder)	Ctrl+W
Accept ghost-text suggestion	Tab
Find in tab	Ctrl+F
Find across all tabs	Ctrl+Shift+F
Save scrollback	Ctrl+Shift+S
SFTP panel	Ctrl+Shift+B
SSH Profiles	Ctrl+Shift+S
History	Ctrl+H
Settings	Ctrl+,
Always on top	Ctrl+Shift+T
Quake mode toggle	Ctrl+Shift+Q (when enabled)
Select next match	Ctrl+D (with selection)

All rebindable in Settings → Shortcuts.

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📋 Workspace file example

Drop .nexterm.yml into any folder, then "Open in NexTerm here" loads the whole layout:

tabs:
  - name: Server
    cwd: ./server
    command: npm run dev
  - name: Client
    cwd: ./client
    command: npm run dev
  - name: DB
    cwd: .
    command: docker compose logs -f db
  - name: Notes
    shell: pwsh.exe

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🛠️ Build from source

git clone https://github.com/rajendra7169/NexTerm.git
cd NexTerm
npm install
npm run dev

To produce a Windows installer:

npm run build           # bundle main, preload, renderer
npx electron-builder --win

The signed-style installer lands in release/NexTerm-Setup-<version>.exe.

Stack

• Electron 30 + electron-vite + electron-builder
• React 18 + Zustand
• xterm.js v5 (with fit / search / web-links / image addons)
• Monaco editor + @monaco-editor/react for Coder mode
• node-pty for the PTY layer
• better-sqlite3 for history / profiles / secrets / AI conversations
• ssh2 for SFTP
• pdfjs-dist for PDF text extraction (AI attachments)

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🧱 Project structure

src/
├── main/          # Electron main process (PTY, IPC, SQLite, SSH/SFTP, banners)
├── preload/       # contextBridge exposing window.nexterm.* to renderer
└── renderer/
    └── src/
        ├── App.jsx
        ├── store/             # Zustand store
        ├── themes/            # 19 themes
        ├── components/        # Terminal, TabBar, TitleBar, Settings, etc.
        ├── shortcuts.js       # action registry
        └── styles/index.css
build/            # icons + NSIS sidebar/header bitmaps

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📜 License

NexTerm is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0.

In plain English:

• ✅ Free to use for personal, hobby, study, research, and any other non-commercial purpose
• ✅ Free for charities, schools, public-research, and government institutions
• ✅ Free to fork, modify, and share non-commercially
• ❌ No commercial use — you may not sell, bundle, host, or monetize NexTerm or any work based on it
• ❌ No commercial redistribution — including paid SaaS, paid support, or selling modified copies

If you'd like to use NexTerm commercially, please contact the author for a separate commercial license.

NexTerm is built and maintained by Rajendra Pandey. Bugs, features, ideas → open an issue.