What if your command line terminal could display more than just text? That’s crazy, right (I can hear the screams of thousands of graybeard sysadmins). Well not all the time, but maybe just when you want it to. Like displaying Markdown, Images, or CSVs (that you can actually copy from and paste directly into Excel). Or being able to run an editor, natively, right inline in your terminal that has mouse support, copy/paste, indentation, and syntax highlighting right out of the box for when you need to copy a line or two into your remote .bashrc file?

That’s why we built Wave, to keep what’s best about the command line while adding the power of the open web.

What is Wave?

Wave is a cross-platform open-source terminal that supports inline rendering, modern UI, and persistent sessions. Wave was built to keep what’s best about the command line while adding the power of the open web. Wave has inline renderers for terminal content and remote files to help keep you in flow and reduce context switches. We have 5 initial plugins: remote file editor, markdown viewer, image viewer, CSV viewer, and a ChatGPT interface, with more coming soon.

But Wave isn’t just a simple renderer trick. We’ve been working on Wave for over a year and have over 1200 commits. We’re on a mission to improve terminal DevEx across the board and fix all sorts of terminal micro-frustrations. Wave manages your remote SSH connections, seamlessly restoring sessions, persisting sessions, and giving you a searchable contextual history of all the commands you’ve run, across all of your sessions and remote machines.

What is Wave built on?

We’re proudly built on Electron (just like VSCode, Slack, and Discord) with all of the network code and heavy lifting done in a local Go backend. This enables us to deliver a consistent cross-platform experience and the ability to leverage high-quality web components for our UI and plugins.What's next?

Is Wave open-source?

Openness is a core part of our mission. Our code is open source (Apache 2.0), and our plugins are written in TypeScript/React. We don’t require an email, login, or payment to use our terminal (it is free as in speech and as in beer).

What platforms does Wave work on?

Wave works on MacOS as well as Linux (preliminary support). We have a Windows WSL port coming soon.

How will Wave make money?

We get asked this question a lot! Basic rule of thumb is if it runs on your own computer with your own resources it will be free, if it hits our servers using our resources it will be paid. Yes, we do plan on making money in the future, through opt-in team collaboration features.

What features do you have?

Check out our Wave Terminal demo video to get an overview of our initial features.

What's Next?

We're just getting started. If you’re interested, please give it a try and give us a Star on Github to show your support for Open Source! Feedback, bugs, feature requests, and contributions are all welcome. Happy Hacking!

https://www.waveterm.dev | https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm