Cove

A workspace-oriented terminal for Linux, built on Ghostty's GTK frontend with features inspired by cmux.

Cove adds a vertical sidebar, workspace management, notification system, and more on top of Ghostty's excellent terminal engine — bringing the workspace-first philosophy of cmux to Linux.

• Vertical sidebar with workspace list (replacing the traditional tab bar)
• Workspace CRUD — create, close, rename, reorder workspaces
• Close button on hover + middle-click to close
• Right-click context menu — Rename, Move Up/Down, Close
• Double-click to rename workspaces
• Keyboard navigation — Up/Down in sidebar, Enter to select, Ctrl+Tab/Alt+1-9 switching
• Sidebar toggle — button, menu entry, or hide completely
• Full Ghostty terminal — GPU-accelerated rendering, splits, search, Wayland/X11

• Notification rings on sidebar badges when background processes finish
• Workspace metadata — git branch, working directory, listening ports
• Socket API & CLI for scripting (cove +list-workspaces, cove +send, etc.)
• In-app browser via WebKitGTK
• Session persistence across restarts

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ◀ Cove                                          ☰      │
├──────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Workspaces + │                                          │
│──────────────│  ~/code/cove $ zig build                 │
│ ▶ zsh        │  Build succeeded.                        │
│   server     │  ~/code/cove $ _                         │
│   logs       │                                          │
│              │                                          │
│              │                                          │
│              │                                          │
└──────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘

Requirements: Zig 0.15.2, GTK4 4.14+, libadwaita 1.4+, blueprint-compiler, pkgconf, pandoc, gettext

# Build
./build.sh

# Build and run
./build.sh run

# Run tests
zig build test

sudo pacman -S zig gtk4 libadwaita blueprint-compiler pkgconf pandoc gettext

Cove reads your existing Ghostty configuration from ~/.config/ghostty/config. All terminal settings (fonts, colors, themes, keybinds) work as-is.

Cove is built on the shoulders of two excellent projects:

Cove's terminal engine — rendering, input handling, split panes, search, Wayland/X11 support — comes from Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto. Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich terminal emulator written in Zig with native GPU-accelerated rendering.

Cove is a fork of Ghostty's GTK frontend with a workspace-oriented UI added on top.

• Website: https://ghostty.org/
• Source: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
• License: MIT

Cove's feature set — vertical sidebar, notification rings, workspace metadata, socket API, in-app browser — is inspired by cmux by Manaflow AI. cmux is a native macOS terminal built on libghostty with the same workspace-first philosophy. Cove brings these ideas to Linux.

• Website: https://cmux.dev/
• Source: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
• License: MIT

Cove is licensed under the MIT License, consistent with both upstream projects. See LICENSE and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md for details.