Beta
Ants Terminal
A fast, modern terminal tuned for smoother coding sessions.
Demo
Screenshots
About Ants Terminal
A terminal is the window where you type commands to your computer. Ants Terminal is a fast, good-looking one for Linux, written from scratch — but the reason it exists is what it does when you are working alongside Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant.
The problem it solves
Claude Code charges by the token — roughly, a small chunk of text it reads or writes. Every time it needs to look something up, it runs a command and reads all of the output. Checking what changed in your code, searching your files, reading a long to-do list: each one is a wall of text you pay for.
Ants Terminal answers a lot of those questions itself and hands Claude a short, tidy summary instead. It ships 93 built-in tools that replace the expensive long-hand commands — where is this function defined, what changed on this branch, what did the last test run say — and a counter in the bottom bar keeps a running total of what they have saved you this session.
You do not have to learn any of it. Claude picks the right tool on its own once the terminal is connected.
Working alongside Claude
- See what it is doing. The bottom bar shows Claude's status — thinking, editing, searching — and how full its memory is getting.
- See what it changed before you keep it. A Review Changes button opens a file-by-file view of every edit.
- Browse and resume past sessions without leaving the terminal.
- Set permissions visually, rather than hand-editing a settings file.
- Paste a screenshot and the file lands in the prompt ready to send.
All of this happens on your own machine. Nothing is sent anywhere.
It is also just a good terminal
With Claude out of the picture entirely: full colour and Unicode, full-screen
programs like vim and htop, programming-font ligatures, inline images,
clickable links and file paths, a command palette, searchable history, a
pop-out editor for long commands, a snippets library, 11 colour themes with
automatic dark/light switching, and small Lua plugins that run sandboxed and
cannot freeze the window.
It needs nothing but Qt6, which most Linux desktops already have, so it starts quickly and stays light.
Getting it
On openSUSE, Fedora or Mageia, add the repository once and install it like any other program — you then get updates automatically. On anything else, the AppImage is a single file: download it, make it executable, run it. Both routes are on the download buttons above.
Your settings live in ~/.config/ants-terminal/, readable only by you. The
terminal makes no network connections at all unless you switch on the optional
AI chat.
Where it stands
In beta and used daily — it is the terminal this website was built in. Linux only; there is no Windows or macOS build and none planned. MIT licensed.
What's new · v0.7.111 22 September 2026
Hotfix. Restores the Mageia package, which 0.7.110 could not build.
Fixed
- The Mageia package builds again (ANTS-5304) A self-check compared the way Ants lowercases a roadmap id against the way its database does it, using accented letters as the example. Most Linux distributions lowercase only English letters there; Mageia's build also lowercases accented ones, so the two disagreed and the package build stopped before it finished. The check now uses only the characters a roadmap id can actually contain, so it gives the same answer everywhere. No change to the program itself — this is a packaging fix.