Mica

Terminal emulator focused on smooth motion and lightweight rendering.

Mission

• Lightweight terminal emulator
• Smooth and fluid motions, and or animations
• Extensible via open source code
• Diverging from biased appendages

Note

Projected release: 2026 August

Features

alpha 0.1

1. Smooth kareting
2. Smooth cursor blink
3. Config is a file — one file, and nothing else writes it

Keyboard

Settings: cmd+, — opens settings.toml in your editor

Reload Settings: cmd+shift+, — applies the file without leaving Mica

Every binding is listed in settings.toml under [keys], with a commented catalogue of every action above it. A binding named text:… types the rest of its name into the shell:

[keys]
"text:clear && ls -la\n" = "cmd+shift+l"

Terminal interaction

• Drag to select; double-click selects a word; triple-click selects a line; Option-drag makes a rectangular selection.
• cmd+a selects the focused pane's complete scrollback; cmd+c copies and cmd+v pastes using the child process's negotiated bracketed-paste mode.
• Set copy-on-select = true under [selection] to copy when a drag ends.
• Mouse-aware CLI applications receive pointer, wheel and focus events. Hold Shift while dragging to select terminal text instead.
• macOS input methods, OSC 8 Command-click links, OSC 52 clipboard writes, bell policy and terminal notifications are supported.

Shell integration

Zsh chains .zprofile, .zshenv, and .zshrc from the user's original ZDOTDIR, so aliases can find executables added to PATH by login-profile setup.

Build and run locally

Notarisation is not required to compile or run a local build. Mica needs macOS 14 or newer, Rust 1.90, Xcode or the Command Line Tools for xcrun metal and xcrun metallib, and a working Metal device. Zig is not required for the default Alacritty backend.

export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"
cargo build --release -p mica-shell --bin mica
./bundle.sh release
open target/release/Mica.app

The bundle is ad-hoc signed for local use. A copy downloaded from elsewhere may still trigger a Gatekeeper warning; Developer ID signing and notarisation are distribution requirements, not build requirements. The full workspace test suite includes Metal renderer tests and must run on a machine with a working Metal device; otherwise those tests report NoDevice even though the project can compile.