An open-source, native-webview terminal bay.
Created & maintained by Moh - https://github.com/Yupmoh
Early development, evolving in the open. v0.1.1 is the first tagged release -
the M0 foundations milestone (engine, control channel, lossless PTY, persistence,
source-gen dispatch). Interfaces and layout may still change.
Cove is a fast, quiet terminal bay: a headless engine owns your shells, sessions, and state, while thin GUI and terminal clients attach to it over a local control channel. Cove aims to stay out of your way - no engagement nudges, no forced ceremonies - and to treat latency and losslessness as features.
Prebuilt cove command-line binaries for macOS (arm64), Linux (x64), and
Windows (x64) are attached to every release on the
Releases page. Download the archive
for your platform, unzip it, and run the cove binary next to its bundled
libraries:
unzip cove-osx-arm64.zip
./cove version
./cove daemon run --channel dev
The binaries are not yet code-signed. On macOS, clear the download quarantine
first: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine cove.
macOS releases include cove-macos-app.zip - a self-contained Cove.app
bundling the GUI and its engine. Unzip and launch it:
unzip cove-macos-app.zip
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Cove.app
open Cove.app
The xattr step (or right-click → Open once) clears Gatekeeper for the
unsigned build. Cove starts its own engine and opens a live terminal.
Private Apple Silicon builds can be produced locally with:
COVE_VERSION=0.5.0 scripts/package-macos-app.sh osx-arm64 artifacts/macos-local
cd artifacts/macos-local && shasum -a 256 -c Cove-0.5.0-osx-arm64.zip.sha256
The resulting ZIP is ad-hoc signed and includes its SHA-256 checksum, but it is not notarized. A private tester must use right-click → Open once or clear the download quarantine before the first launch. Official releases will use Apple Developer ID signing and notarization.
The graphical bay is a native-webview terminal that renders a real shell
losslessly. macOS ships the prebuilt Cove.app above; on Linux and Windows, or
for development, run it from source. Start the engine, then the GUI:
dotnet run --project src/Cove.Cli -- daemon run --channel dev
dotnet run --project src/Cove.Gui
The engine, control channel, and persistence run on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Interactive PTY nooks are fully supported on macOS and Linux. Windows ships a ConPTY-backed terminal host and is currently experimental: the engine, GUI, and adapters run, while terminal output streaming is still being hardened.
Cove is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE and
NOTICE. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
"Cove" and the Cove wordmark are used by the project maintainer. The Apache-2.0
license grants no trademark rights (see LICENSE section 6). Please do not use
the name in a way that implies endorsement by or affiliation with the project
without permission.