A minimal, native terminal emulator for macOS. AppKit + SwiftUI, Metal-rendered, no config files.

• macOS-only. Built to feel like something Apple could have shipped.
• Minimal. Tabs, no splits. Preferences live in a single native window.
• Accurate. VT parsing via Rust's alacritty_terminal — the same engine as Alacritty and Zed.
• Fast. 120 Hz on ProMotion, low input-to-pixel latency, GPU-rendered.

Not interested in: cross-platform, splits, session restore, profiles, plugins, scripting, config files, AI, inline images.

• Rendering. Metal GPU renderer hitting native 120 Hz on ProMotion. Per-row caching redraws only what changed.
• Terminal compatibility. 24-bit color, Kitty keyboard protocol, synchronized output, bracketed paste, mouse reporting, focus events, 100k-line scrollback (lazily allocated). Five underline styles with independent colors (LSP squigglies work).
• Tabs. Native NSWindow tab groups, per-tab shell session, confirmation before closing multi-tab windows.
• Input. Full IME support for CJK, dead keys, trackpad pinch-to-zoom.
• Find. ⌘F regex search across scrollback; ⌘⌥E for replace.
• URLs. ⌘-click opens http/https/ftp/mailto. file:// and other schemes are intentionally blocked — terminal output shouldn't be one click away from executing a local path. OSC 8 hyperlinks supported.
• Clipboard. ⌘C/⌘V with paste and copy scrubbing (strips C0 controls and Unicode bidi overrides). OSC 52 remote-clipboard writes are disabled by default; the Swift gate (size cap + scrub) is defense-in-depth if ever flipped on.
• Drag-and-drop. File paths dropped onto the terminal are shell-quoted and forwarded to the foreground child. C0 / DEL / bidi-override bytes are stripped before send.
• Accessibility. VoiceOver navigates the terminal by character, word, and line. .textArea contract pinned by tests.
• Color emoji. Apple Color Emoji and any third-party COLRv1 / sbix / CBDT font rasterizes through a dedicated bgra8 atlas alongside the mono coverage atlas.
• Themes. Default, Gruvbox, Solarized, Catppuccin. Light/dark auto-follows the system.
• Shell integration (opt-in). Bundled OSC 133 snippets for bash/zsh/fish enable prompt-jumping with ⌘⇧↑/⌘⇧↓.
• Fonts. Hack Nerd Font Mono ships in the bundle. Any installed monospaced family is selectable.
• Diagnostics. Settings → Diagnostics surfaces hang reports and macOS crash reports with Copy / Reveal / Email actions. No upload, no SDK, no backend.
• Auto-updates. Sparkle 2.x, signed appcast.

Download the signed, notarized DMG from blackbird-terminal.com or the Releases page. Universal binary — Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Auto-updates ship through Sparkle once installed.

Requirements: macOS 14+, Xcode 16.2, Rust stable with both Apple targets, xcodegen.

xcodegen generate
scripts/build-core.sh
xcodebuild -project Blackbird.xcodeproj -scheme Blackbird build

The Xcode target runs build-core.sh as a pre-build step, so xcodebuild build alone works after xcodegen generate.

# Rust core
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy -p blackbird_core --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test  -p blackbird_core --lib --tests

# Swift
xcodebuild test \
  -project Blackbird.xcodeproj \
  -scheme Blackbird \
  -destination 'platform=macOS,arch=arm64'

The Debug scheme enables ASan and UBSan. A cargo-fuzz target for the parser lives in core/fuzz/.

CI gates on parser throughput (plain_text ≥ 25 MiB/s, binary_garbage ≥ 15 MiB/s, ansi_log ≥ 30 MiB/s over 64 MiB payloads) and long-session memory stability. Dev-machine numbers typically run 2–3× the floors.

See docs/benchmarks/vtebench-2026-04-20.md for a cross-terminal throughput comparison (Terminal.app, iTerm2, Ghostty, Alacritty, Blackbird).

Vulnerability reporting and threat model: SECURITY.md. Known polish items deliberately deferred: KNOWN_ISSUES.md.

MIT.