COSMIC: The Road to Alpha
blog.system76.com
Introducing COSMIC Terminal, and what’s left on the roadmap for COSMIC DE?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8455606

If all goes well, we can release the alpha by the end of March

Now Available on NixOS!

COSMIC Terminal joins a long list of COSMIC DE projects that have been packaged for NixOS! While COSMIC DE will be the flagship desktop for Pop!_OS, it’s designed and architected for distros to build their own custom, branded user experiences. Details for distro packaging will be released at the same time as the alpha.

  • ericjmoreyOPEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    Kinda seems like they want to have close integration with the rest of the desktop environment and Pop_OS but still remain modular by using the alacritty_terminal framework. I’m sure they are mostly concerned with performance on the System76 laptop hardware.

    We built a terminal application for COSMIC DE. COSMIC Terminal (cosmic-term) features bidirectional rendering (left-right and right-left languages), ligatures (æ, for example), desktop themes, syntax themes, and GPU rendering. This terminal emulator was built using the alacritty_terminal framework with a custom renderer based on COSMIC Text, while GPU rendering uses glyphon and wgpu with softbuffer and tiny-skia as a fallback. We were able to optimize this to have performance similar to Alacritty; both in vtebench and when displaying an 8 MB text file.

    We’re working on adding mouse emulation and the ability to open hyperlinks in the terminal, as well as ironing out a few wrinkles.