Ember

Changelog

Release notes

All notable changes to Ember are documented here. The format follows Keep a Changelog, and Ember aims to follow Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

0.5.0 - 2026-07-18

Added

  • OSC 52 clipboard read, gated. Programs could always COPY through Ember (tmux and nvim over ssh); they can now also ASK for the clipboard's contents, but only when osc52_read = true is set in config.toml. It is off by default because any program in the terminal could quietly read what you last copied; when off, requests get an empty answer instead of hanging the program.
  • Command palette. Cmd+Shift+P opens a fuzzy-searchable list of every keyboard action, with its shortcut shown beside it, so features are discoverable without memorizing chords: type a few letters, arrows to choose, Enter runs it, Escape closes. Picking an action teaches its shortcut for next time.
  • Search in scrollback. Cmd+F opens a find bar: type to search incrementally (regex, smart-case: lowercase queries match case-insensitively), Enter jumps to the next match and Shift+Enter to the previous one, wrapping around the buffer. The bar shows your query and a match count ("3 / 41", or "no matches"), and the key hints. The view scrolls to each hit and highlights it; the highlight rides the anchored-selection machinery, so it stays glued to the match while output keeps scrolling, and Cmd+C copies it. Escape closes the bar. Also drivable as ctl search / search-back.

Fixed

  • The search bar and command palette can no longer be open at the same time: opening one closes the other. Stacked, both silently captured typing, which read as the terminal not responding to input. The palette also keeps its "no matching actions" line visible instead of collapsing to a sliver when a query matches nothing.
  • Selections now stay glued to their text. Selecting text and letting output scroll (or paging through scrollback) used to leave the highlight parked at fixed screen rows while different text slid through it, and Copy would grab whatever text sat there now. The selection is anchored to the text itself: the highlight travels with it, scrolls out of view and back in with it, and Copy always returns the text that was actually selected.

Security

  • Removed input logging from the EMBER_DEBUG diagnostic flag. When Ember ran with EMBER_DEBUG=1, it wrote each key press to its diagnostic output (stderr). That normally just prints to the terminal, but if you were capturing it to a file, the usual way you'd collect a debug log, your key presses could be recorded there, potentially including sensitive input like passwords. It is removed so that can't happen by accident. This only applied if you set EMBER_DEBUG yourself (a diagnostic flag, separate from Developer Mode), so in practice almost no one is likely to have hit it. Rendering and frame diagnostics under the same flag are unchanged.

0.4.2 - 2026-07-10

Added

  • Drop a file from Finder (or a Linux file manager) onto a window and its shell-escaped path is inserted at the prompt, matching iTerm2: plain paths pass through bare, paths with spaces or special characters are single-quoted, multiple files arrive space-separated, and delivery respects bracketed paste.
  • Linux desktop integration. Ember now ships a freedesktop launcher entry and hicolor icons (extra/linux, with install instructions), so it can appear in the GNOME app grid and KDE launcher instead of requiring a manual terminal launch. Windows also set a stable identity (X11 WM_CLASS and Wayland app_id, both ember-term), so running windows group under the launcher icon.

Security

  • Dropped the menu library's unused GTK backend (pulled in only on Linux, where the menu is an inert stub — Ember's menu is macOS-only). This removes a flagged glib transitive dependency, clearing the advisory from the dependency tree.

0.4.1 - 2026-07-10

Added

  • Six selectable wisp styles. The glowing drag token now has a look you can pick in Settings: Cinder (the original amber core and orbiting sparks, renamed from Ember; the old name still parses), Coal (a small charcoal rock rendered by its own procedural shader, with pulsing hot cracks, a breathing core, and a gentle shower of embers rising off its surface), Will-o'-the-wisp (a soft, cool, breathing orb with a wispy vapor tail), Comet (a clean white-hot head with a soft glow), Goo (a wobbling molten droplet shedding embers that float up as they cool), and Star (a dazzling white core with a blue-white bloom and a lens-flare sparkle). A Random option steps to a fresh style on each drag.

Fixed

  • A renamed tab dragged into another tab as a split, then dragged back out to a tab (or a new window), lost its custom name. The name now travels with the pane and is restored when the pane becomes a tab again, surviving any number of round-trips, including across windows.

0.4.0 - 2026-07-08

Added

  • Ghost tab. When you drag a tab or pane over a tab strip, yours or another window's, the strip shows a wispy, shimmering tab chip in the spot it will land, labeled with the surface's title, instead of the old bare insertion caret. The other tabs shift over to make room, and the ghost lands as the real tab the moment you drop.
  • Spring-loaded tabs while dragging. Hover a strip tab for a beat during a live drag (about 150 ms, like macOS Finder folders) and it becomes the displayed tab, so you can navigate to any tab mid-drag, move down into its panes, and drop exactly where you mean to. Skating across the strip does not thrash the display, and the ghost's own landing spot never switches tabs.
  • Suck-in and pour-out. Tearing a surface off (tab drag, pane drag, or hold-to-wisp) visibly collapses the whole surface toward your cursor as it goes: the full pane for a pane drag, the whole tab content area for a tab drag, the entire window when it is the window's only tab. Dropping pours the rect back out at the landing spot, Escape pours it back out where it started, and a window that gave up its last tab plays its collapse before closing. All skipped under Reduce Motion for an instant transfer.
  • Hold to wisp now works on tabs, not just panes. Press and hold a tab and the same ring sweeps it into the wisp to carry, no drag needed.

Fixed

  • Dragging a divider now moves the divider you grabbed. In a window with nested splits, most easily made by merging a multi-pane tab into another window, grabbing one divider could move an adjacent one instead.
  • Ember no longer grows its memory use while the display sleeps. A window whose GPU surface goes away now backs off between attempts instead of retrying as fast as it can, which could balloon memory over a long sleep.
  • The control surface serves several connections at once and drops idle ones, so a stuck client can no longer block other ctl commands.

0.3.1 - 2026-07-08

Added

  • Ember sparks guardrails. The ember_sparks on/off switch is now a three-way dial, sparks = "off" | "focused" | "always" in config.toml (default focused), cycled from the Settings overlay's "Ember sparks" row. focused animates sparks only in the window you're actually looking at; unfocused windows keep their sparks visible but hold still until you switch back. Old configs with ember_sparks = true/false still load, mapped to focused/off. Two system signals pause the animation automatically on macOS: Low Power Mode turns sparks fully off, and Reduce Motion freezes them without hiding them, regardless of the dial.

0.3.0 - 2026-07-08

Added

  • External tools can now find and jump to tabs. ctl state reports every tab (index, active, title, sessions), ctl focus <query> selects the first tab whose title matches and brings the Ember window to the front, and ctl raise raises the window on its own. All three are also exposed as MCP tools. Built for hardware macro decks and agent dashboards that map a name to "the tab running that thing".
  • Multiple windows. Open new windows (Cmd+N on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+N on Linux), and move terminal surfaces freely between them: promote a split pane to its own tab or window, move tabs to another window, and merge a tab back into another as a split. Shells keep running through every move. Available from the Window menu on macOS, keyboard shortcuts on both platforms, and the control surface (move-tab, promote-pane, merge-tab, new-window).
  • The control surface's state now reports every window (windows array plus focused_window), and focus <query> finds and raises the right window across all of them.
  • Drag tabs and panes between windows. Tear a tab off the strip or hold Cmd+Opt (macOS) or Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Linux) and drag a pane: edges of a target pane split it, the center adds a tab, and empty desktop makes a new window right there. While you carry a surface between windows it becomes a wisp, a small ember that rides the pointer (turn it off with wisp = false). Escape cancels any drag, and shells keep running through every drop.
  • Hold to wisp. Press and hold on any pane and a small ring draws itself closed around your cursor; when it completes, the pane is swept into the wisp and you are carrying it, no keyboard involved. Move before the ring closes and the press falls back to an ordinary selection. Within a window, dragging a surface onto a pane splits it on the nearest side; the window a carried surface hovers comes forward so you can see where it will land, and a window's only tab now shows its chip so there is always something to grab.

Changed

  • The campfire is now fully lit by default: a fresh install opens with the warm gradient and drifting ember sparks. The sparks render as short glowing trails (velocity-stretched motion blur) instead of plain dots, which keeps the drift smooth at the gentle default of 15 frames per second. Measured on an Apple Silicon MacBook, the animation costs about 2% of one core and a few tens of milliwatts of GPU while the window is visible, and nothing when the window is hidden. Tune or disable it in Settings (Ember sparks, Ember FPS, Ember density); automatic pauses on unfocused windows, on battery, and under Reduce Motion arrive in the next patch release.
  • In ctl state, the tabs field changed from a count to the array above. Callers that read it as a number should use the array's length.

Fixed

  • Linux keyboard shortcuts no longer fight the GNOME shell. GNOME reserves many Super combinations (Super+1..9, Super+Arrows, Super+D, Super+V), so Ember now also binds the conventional Linux forms: Ctrl+Shift+C/V/T/W/D, Ctrl+Shift+Arrows to focus panes, Alt+Shift+D and Alt+Shift+Arrows, Alt+1..9 to jump to a tab, and Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 for zoom. Super still works where the window manager passes it through, and the shortcuts overlay now shows the bindings that work everywhere.
  • A plain click (no drag) now clears the selection, like other terminals, instead of leaving a single cell selected. Drag selections and double/triple-click word and line selections behave as before.

0.2.1 - 2026-07-06

Fixed

  • Ember now launches on Ubuntu 22.04. The 0.2.0 Linux builds were made against a newer glibc, which made Homebrew interpose its own C library on 22.04 hosts; the GPU drivers then failed to load and the app never opened a window. Linux builds are now made against Ubuntu 22.04's glibc, so one build runs cleanly on 22.04, 24.04, and 26.04, and Ubuntu 22.04 is part of continuous testing from now on.

0.2.0 - 2026-07-06

Added

  • Font settings, live from the Settings panel: pick the font family from a curated monospace list and set the size (6 to 48pt). Both apply immediately, no restart.
  • The Settings panel is organized into Appearance, Terminal, and Developer sections, and now also surfaces shell integration and Option-as-Meta.
  • Clickable URLs. Web links in terminal output are subtly underlined; click one at the prompt to open it in your browser. Inside mouse-driven apps like vim or tmux, hold Cmd (macOS) or Ctrl (Linux) and click.

Changed

  • The warm gradient backdrop is now on by default, so a fresh install opens with Ember's signature look. It draws statically and costs nothing while idle; the ember sparks animation stays opt-in. Turn the gradient off in Settings if you prefer a flat background.
  • The Settings panel re-shapes its text only when something actually changes, not on every frame, keeping the app responsive while it is open.

Fixed

  • On Linux, the keyboard shortcuts overlay now shows Super instead of Cmd, matching the keys you actually press.
  • The Settings panel no longer misaligns its value column at very large or very small terminal font sizes.

0.1.0 - 2026-07-04

The first release. Ember is a GPU-accelerated terminal built around a campfire aesthetic, running natively on macOS and Linux.

Ember's birthday release, launched on America's 250th, July 4th, 2026. Happy Fourth of July. 🎆

Added

  • Split panes and tabs. Split side-by-side or stacked, resize by dragging any divider, navigate between panes by direction, drag tabs to reorder, rename them inline, and jump straight to a tab by number.
  • Native, GPU-rendered text, including full text attributes (bold, italic, underline, strikeout, overline, dim, concealed) and full wide-character/CJK rendering.
  • Hand-rasterized box-drawing. Every light, heavy, double, dashed, rounded, and diagonal box-drawing glyph is drawn as a real vector shape rather than a font glyph, so borders and diagrams stay crisp and perfectly joined at any font size or display scale. Cross-checked against Alacritty and Ghostty's rendering for the full block.
  • Shell integration. Automatic exit-status markers in the gutter (green, red, or amber), jump to the previous or next prompt, and cwd-inheriting splits and manual navigable marks when your shell supports iTerm2's shell-integration escape codes. Installs itself into zsh and bash with no manual setup.
  • Mouse support: text selection (click, word, and line modes) with system clipboard copy/paste, bracketed paste, wrapped-line-aware copy, a draggable scrollbar, and full mouse reporting (clicks, drags, motion, wheel) forwarded to mouse-aware terminal apps.
  • A campfire backdrop with drifting ember sparks, off by default and fully configurable (density, frame rate, scrim).
  • A visual bell: an ember flash instead of an audible beep, with a bell indicator on background tabs.
  • Settings (Cmd+,), an About page with version and build info, and a keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet (Cmd+/).
  • A confirmation prompt before closing a pane or window with a running process.
  • Developer Mode (off by default): a control socket and MCP server for driving and inspecting a running instance, useful for scripting and automated testing.
  • Configurable font family and size, with live zoom (Cmd +/-/0).
  • A macOS Homebrew cask, app bundle, dock icon, and native menu bar.
  • Linux support built and verified on Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, x86_64 and arm64, on both X11 and Wayland.

Fixed

A handful of hardening fixes worth knowing about, found and fixed before this first release:

  • A GPU resource leak that could exhaust memory over a long session, and a related issue where an occluded or sleeping window would spin the GPU allocating frames it never presented.
  • A hairline gap that could appear between adjacent box-drawing cells at certain font-size and display-scale combinations.
  • Glyph-advance jitter that made spinners and other rapidly-updating symbols appear to twitch.

Security

  • The developer-mode control socket and shell-integration directory are created owner-only, use no fixed or predictable paths, and return JSON-encoded errors rather than leaking internal state.