A terminal that outruns Alacritty and refuses to forget

What it does

tty7 is a terminal emulator and persistent-session workbench built in Rust. It runs local shells, native SSH connections, and coding agents inside GPU-rendered windows, and it keeps those sessions alive in a background server so they survive client quits and system reboots. A bundled CLI and skill interface lets agents like Claude Code open panes, run commands, and inspect output directly.

The interesting bit

Rather than writing a new VT parser, the project bolts Alacritty’s alacritty_terminal crate onto Zed’s gpui for rendering, then wraps the whole stack with a session server and native SSH via russh. That makes it less a from-scratch terminal and more a high-performance integration layer that happens to beat dedicated emulators in plaintext throughput.

Key highlights

• In a plaintext I/O test with an 11 MB file, tty7 finished in ~95 ms on an Apple M1 Pro, versus 179–239 ms for Kitty, Ghostty, and Alacritty; a DOOM-fire animation benchmark ran at 888 fps.
• Sessions persist in an ~11 MB server process, so rebooting or closing the GUI does not kill your shells, repos, or agent states.
• Native SSH through russh supports profiles, SFTP, jump hosts, and port forwarding; remote files and git context remain on the host.
• Agent-aware panes detect roughly 17 CLI tools and surface status dots, branch and diff context, and tray notifications when the agent needs input.
• Editor-grade shell input includes fuzzy history search, syntax-highlighted tab completion, ghost suggestions, and multi-line editing.

Caveats

• All published benchmarks were run on a single macOS machine (M1 Pro); cross-platform and cross-hardware performance is not yet shown.
• The README promises reconnecting “from any client,” but it is unclear how session synchronization and security work across different machines.
• Agent integration is exposed through a bundled CLI and a SKILL.md spec, yet the surrounding skill ecosystem appears immature.

Verdict

Terminal-heavy developers who want persistent remote workspaces and first-class agent integration without gluing tmux, SSH, and a GPU emulator together should look here. If your current terminal setup is already boring and stable, tty7 is probably overkill.