Early access starts Tuesday, July 15th 2025!

Terminal lovers,

I’m excited to announce Terminal Click (TC) is available to the general public in a couple of weeks! I want to use this blog post to offer a progress report, and to explain how this early access will work.

Open beta? Early access? I’m not sure what to call it.

Over the years I have made it clear that I’m an indie dev with zero investors. However, I’m at a point in my life where I do need revenue for development to continue uninterrupted. Instead of seeking third-party investors, I call upon the fanbase (the so-called Clickity Clackity Club) to help me out!

For $5/mo you get a monthly build of Terminal Click. For $5 each month (cancel anytime) you make sure this software stays free of VC-funding and free of AI.

You’ll get a fully offline binary while keeping the author 100% indie.

How does access work?

Visit the beta page on July 15th and use Stripe or PayPal to become a TC Member. You’ll receive an email with a Proton drive link. From there you’ll be able to download the terminal for Windows, Mac, or Linux: all three are always available.

TC members get a monthly email with a new version of the terminal.

WARNING: Don’t bookmark Proton drive links; they change frequently to fight piracy. Choose the link from your most recent monthly email.

Progress Report

  1. 3D Space and Infinite Rewind

In my previous devlog, I made the case that what’s holding terminals back are traditional shells like bash, zsh and so on. To be more precise, my argument is that we should not be permanently tethered to one, letting shells make all the decisions (without the terminal emulator knowing what’s going on at all.)

In that blog post I demonstrated various demos of the power of killing the shell, but I never showed a complete session of how I might use Terminal Click day-to-day. In the video below I compare the suckless terminal (one that follows tradition like most other emulators) versus my own.

If the viewer is patient then the payoff is worthwhile because of some new features I’ve never shown on this website before:

Indeed, I have flipped this abusive, decades-long relationship on its head: Terminal Click is never connected to an old-school shell by default. We plug in only when it’s absolutely necessary, but we are otherwise unplugged by default. Of course, the fallout of this decision was discussed at length on Hacker News, and the engineering work required to deal with the (ongoing) fallout of this design is my main responsibility as the project author.

  1. GIF Support

After seeing the video above, I was asked why I didn’t implement previewing GIF animations if I already have something like 3D previews of 3D models. Fair enough:

  1. Mr. 4th Diagramming Session

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Mr. 4th; the terminal’s core tech sits on top of his open-source platform layer. Thus, I kindly asked Allen Webster for a private 4-hour session so we could map out my codebase architecture and determine how best to spend my time improving things before the open beta.

We were joined by two veteran community members. They’re not public figures, though one of them is attending BSC.

  1. Status Bar

You might’ve seen from the earlier videos that there’s a status bar at the bottom when you’re navigating files and directories. I think there’s plenty of more places to use such a status bar.

As one example, if you’re typing a command to run, it could make sense to show you where in the PATH we found the binary:

Perhaps we should also show user-friendly hints or validation as you continue typing the command. So I’m playing around with this feature to make sure it’s useful, contextual and unobstrusive; the status bar should disappear when it’s not serving any purpose.

Supporting Terminal Click is supporting Handmade Cities!

For those who don’t know, I started the Handmade Network and went on to found Handmade Cities: a series of conferences and meetups for fellow programmers who care about software quality. We’re 100% indie for important reasons:

Without this kind of independent mindset, there would be no Terminal Click or any number of serious projects seeking to innovate without AI.

Ticket sales pay for the costs of putting together a big conference (staff, venue, insurance, etc.) while monthly donations from Donorbox literally pay my rent.

For better or worse, HMC is full of gamedevs, and they are getting massacred. I have received enough “heads up” from supporters that they’re pausing (or have already paused) their donations to me, which is concerning to me. International travel, which I rely on a lot, is also suffering greatly.

It’s time to adapt.

Although my advisory board and I have multiple strategies in mind to make Handmade Cities more profitable, we all agree the most immediate course to take is to diversify my income stream. Terminal Click is legally a separate business, but making revenue here will help me weather this storm and future ones with Handmade Cities.

Therefore, when you join early access, your support will help me supplant all the lost income from my monthly donations.

I wish to remain an indie dev for my Handmade project, and I want to keep running independent Handmade conferences and meetups. Please help me fulfill this wish next Tuesday.

Your indie dev,
Abner