SideTerminal

Your terminal, one edge away.

A premium edge-reveal sidebar terminal for macOS. Nudge your mouse to the screen edge and it glides in; move away and it glides out.
Your session never dies.

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Features

• Edge reveal — a hot zone on your chosen edge (left/right) with a configurable dwell delay and a spring-animated, blurred card.
• Sessions stay alive — hiding never touches the pty. Claude CLI, SSH, tmux, builds — everything keeps running for hours.
• Session switcher — keep up to 10 live sessions on a shelf and switch instantly, each with its full scrollback and running programs.
• Intelligent auto-hide — never hides while you type, select, drag, or scroll.
• Menu bar app — no clutter. Optional Dock icon, single Show/Hide toggle, Settings, session switcher, Restart Session, Quit.
• Live settings — General / Sidebar / Appearance / Behavior / Advanced, applied instantly.
• Record any shortcut — a macOS-style recorder with live availability feedback; taken combos are refused.
• Workspace restore — remembers the working directory across restarts and reboots.
• Never locked out — hide the menu bar icon and an on-card gear appears; the Dock icon, global shortcut, and re-launching all reach Settings too.

Install

1. Download SideTerminal.dmg from the Releases page, open it, and drag SideTerminal into Applications.

2. SideTerminal is open source and unsigned (no paid Apple Developer account), so macOS Gatekeeper blocks it on first launch. Allow it once with:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SideTerminal.app

   Then open it normally. (Alternatively: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.)

Requires macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon. Or build from source below.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/bunnysayzz/sideterminal
cd sideterminal
scripts/bootstrap.sh           # once: fetch the engine + Zig, build the SDK shim
scripts/build-libghostty.sh    # build the engine (slow the first time)
scripts/bundle-app.sh release  # -> build/SideTerminal.app

• Runs on macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon).
• Builds on macOS 26 SDK (Xcode 26 / Tahoe) — the UI uses the latest AppKit/SwiftUI. Only the Xcode Command Line Tools are required, not full Xcode.

Usage

• Move the pointer to your chosen screen edge to reveal; move away to hide.
• Toggle any time with the global shortcut (default `⌘⇧``) or the menu bar icon.
• Drive it from scripts via a DistributedNotificationCenter channel:

  com.sideterminal.control.{show,hide,toggle,settings,restart,status}
  com.sideterminal.control.set   object "theme=dark" | "edge=left" | "width=600"
  

Releasing

The app must be built on macOS 26 (its UI uses the latest SDK), so releases are cut from a maintainer's Mac, not CI. One command tests, builds, packages, and publishes:

scripts/release.sh v1.2.0

It refuses to run unless the unit tests are green in CI for the current commit, then builds the app + DMG and creates a GitHub Release whose notes are generated automatically from the commits and merged PRs since the last release (grouped by label per .github/release.yml).

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. In short: the terminal engine is off-limits (that's the whole point of wrapping a great one); SideTerminal owns the sidebar experience around it. Pure logic lives in app/Core and is unit-tested. Pull requests are automatically checked (build, tests, security, lint, hygiene) and reviewed by CodeRabbit.

License

MIT. Includes third-party open-source components — see THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.md.