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

Unreleased

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.