🍺 beer

A terminal worth pouring time into.

A small, fast, Wayland-native terminal emulator written in Rust drawn entirely on the CPU, with no GPU pipeline, no tabs, no ligatures, and no async runtime to get in the way.

Why another terminal?

Most terminals reach for the GPU and a stack of abstractions before they draw a single glyph. beer goes the other way. It takes its cues from foot keep the moving parts few, render with the CPU through wl_shm, talk to a real PTY, and stay out of the way. The result is a terminal that starts instantly, sits quietly in the background, and spends its cycles on your shell rather than on itself. It is the kind of tool you forget is running which, for a terminal, is the highest compliment. Pour one, get to work.

Project status

beer is pre-1.0 but already comfortable as your daily single-window terminal on Wayland. It’s made clear in documentation about what it does and does not do yet, and it would rather do a smaller set of things well than a larger set half-heartedly. Feature requests are welcome, but not everything will be implemented.

What’s in here

This is a Cargo workspace with two crates:

• crates/beer - the terminal application itself. Start here for the feature list, installation, configuration, and day-to-day use.
• crates/beer-protocols - the reusable, self-documenting building blocks the terminal is made of, and a readable reference for the escape sequences and protocols beer speaks.

If you just want to run it, head to the application README. If you are curious how a terminal actually talks to the programs inside it, the protocols README is a friendly tour.

License

EUPL-1.2.