A terminal that treats AI as a guest, not the host

What it does

con is a native terminal emulator built in Rust on top of Ghostty’s terminal runtime and Zed’s GPUI framework. It ships with a built-in AI agent that can read your terminal context, ask before acting, and work directly in the panes you can already see. The pitch is deliberately narrow: a serious terminal first, AI assistance only when it earns its place.

The interesting bit

The “smart mode” input bar decides whether what you typed is a shell command or an agent request, so there’s no mode-switching ritual. With multiple panes, a pane mini-map lets you broadcast commands to one pane, all panes, or a selected subset — which pairs naturally with the coding-agent orchestration story. There’s also con-cli, so external scripts and agent orchestrators can drive the terminal programmatically.

Key highlights

• GPU-accelerated, native macOS app (Metal); Windows and Linux are in early beta/preview
• Built-in agent with terminal context awareness and ask-before-acting behavior
• Skills and workflows: turn repeated terminal routines into project or personal slash commands
• Workspace layout profiles — save a project’s tab/pane layout and reopen or share it
• First-class ssh, tmux, and multi-agent workflow support; optional macOS Quick Terminal
• Ships an llms.txt so AI agents can read the docs — very on-brand

Caveats

• Active beta: macOS is the only fully supported platform; Windows and Linux are tracked as early beta and preview respectively
• The README is candid that it “does less than Warp” — if you want a maximalist AI terminal, this isn’t it

Verdict

Worth a look if you live in tmux and SSH and want AI help that stays in the passenger seat. If you wanted Warp’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, the README itself tells you to go use Warp.