// the find
skyline69/tron-terminal
Fast GPU accelerated terminal emulator for Linux and macOS, written in Rust. WGSL shaders, kitty graphics, Sixel, ligatures and 460 themes.
tron is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for Linux and macOS written in Rust, competing directly with Alacritty, Ghostty and Kitty. It's aimed at developers who want a fast terminal with modern protocol support (kitty graphics, Sixel, ligatures) and heavy visual customization via WGSL shaders and ~460 bundled themes.
The crate split (tron-core, tron-font, tron-render, tron-pty, tron-config) cleanly separates terminal logic from GPU/windowing code, which is rare discipline for a project this young. It ships actual benchmark numbers against Alacritty and Ghostty rather than just claiming speed, and the shader pipeline (terminal()/previous()/terminal_blur() uniforms) is a genuinely nice abstraction over raw WGSL for cursor trails and CRT effects. The inspector window (live grid/renderer/IO/input state in a second egui window) is a legitimately useful debugging feature most terminal emulators don't bother with, and the install script handles checksum verification and prebuilt-vs-source fallback properly.
No tabs or splits by design, so you're fully dependent on tmux/a WM, which is a real workflow cost for people coming from iTerm2 or Windows Terminal. Only 6 stars and 1 fork with a huge surface area (full VT parser, font shaping, GPU renderer, accessibility, three platforms) is a lot for what looks like a single maintainer to sustain long-term. Some bundled shaders are CC BY-NC-SA or unlicensed-source ports baked directly into the binary, which is a licensing landmine if this gets packaged downstream. Requires Rust 1.98 (not yet released as of most toolchains), suggesting the repo tracks nightly/beta more closely than a stable release target, which could make building from source painful.