Boxxy Terminal
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🔗Terminal Features

Boxxy is, first and foremost, a high-performance Linux terminal built for modern developers. Before you even turn on the AI features, you're using a top-tier terminal emulator designed for speed, clarity, and deep shell integration.

🔗The Core Engine (boxxy-vte)

At the heart of Boxxy is a custom-built, 100% Rust terminal engine. It replaces traditional C-based libraries with a modern, async-first architecture.

  • GPU Accelerated Rendering: Uses GTK4's GSK scene graph to render text and images with silky-smooth performance and zero tearing.
  • Kittygraphics Support: Native support for the Kitty graphics protocol, allowing you to render high-resolution images and even rich media directly in your terminal grid.
  • Semantic Shell Integration: Full support for OSC 133 markers. Boxxy understands the difference between your prompt, your command, and the resulting output, allowing for smarter context awareness.
  • Bidirectional Reflow: Smart text wrapping and unwrapping when you resize your window, ensuring your logs remain readable at any size.
  • Advanced Regex Search: A lightning-fast, Unicode-aware search system with automatic viewport scrolling and word-boundary detection.
  • Robust CWD Tracking: Instant directory tracking via OSC 7, which works seamlessly even over SSH or through sandboxed environments.

🔗UI & Layout

Boxxy is designed to maximize your screen real estate and keep you focused on your work.

  • Dynamic Splits with Soft Swap: Split your terminal vertically or horizontally as many times as you need. With "Soft Swap", you can seamlessly exchange the contents of two active panes via a simple keyboard shortcut without breaking your workflow.
  • iTerm2 Themes: Fully supports the popular iTerm2 color scheme format, giving you access to thousands of community-created themes. Switch between them instantly.
  • Seamless Background Images: Set a background image for your entire tab. Boxxy intelligently spans the image across all transparent terminal splits for a gorgeous, unified look.
  • Inactive Pane Dimming: Never get lost in your splits again. Boxxy automatically dims inactive terminal panes so your active focus is always crystal clear.
  • Modern Hyperlinks: Support for OSC 8 hyperlinks with robust media previews on hover, making your terminal feel more like a modern web browser.
  • Native Progress Bars: Intercepts OSC 9;4 sequences (like those from Cargo or Flatpak) to render native GTK progress bars directly in the UI.

🔗Agentic Features

BoxxyClaw is the AI layer built directly into the terminal. Unlike chat-window add-ons, it has full access to your shell, file system, and terminal buffer — allowing it to act, not just advise.

🔗Characters

Each terminal pane gets its own =Character=: a persistent AI session with a distinct name, personality, and color. Characters are isolated by design — one terminal per task — but you can explicitly link two characters so they share context when working on a multi-terminal project.

Boxxy ships with three pre-built characters. You can edit any of them or add your own via Markdown files in ~/.config/boxxy-terminal/boxxyclaw/characters/. See Characters for details.

🔗Memory System

Boxxy is self-improving. While you work, it silently extracts facts (your preferred editor, your project stack, lessons learned) and stores them in a human-readable file at ~/.config/boxxy-terminal/boxxyclaw/MEMORY.md.

  • Pending → Active: New facts wait for your approval before influencing the character.
  • Project-scoped: Memories can apply globally or only when you are inside a specific folder.
  • Pinned memories (📌): Mark any fact with 📌 to force it into every context window, no matter what.
  • Long-term survival: Long-term memories persist across app updates; short-term ones may not during preview phases.

🔗Toolbox & Approval Protocol

Characters interact with your machine through a structured set of tools rather than free-form shell guessing. Tools are grouped by capability:

  • File Operations: Read, write, and list files — with line-range support to keep tokens low.
  • System Monitoring: Process lists and hardware specs as clean, structured data.
  • Web & Network: Fetch live documentation or look up error codes.
  • Clipboard: Read from and write to your system clipboard.
  • Shell Execution: Run commands directly in your terminal environment.

Any sensitive action (file deletion, process kill, clipboard access) requires your explicit approval via an Approve popover. The character presents its intent; nothing executes until you confirm.

🔗Skills

Characters can dynamically load specialized instruction sets called =Skills= to gain expert-level knowledge on demand. Skills are plain Markdown files in ~/.config/boxxy-terminal/skills/ and are hot-reloaded without restarting the terminal.

Bundled examples include linux-system, linux-cleaner, docker-admin, and network-analyzer. Activation is automatic — the character reads your prompt and loads whichever skill is most relevant.

See Character Skills for the full guide and how to create your own.

🔗MCP Support

Boxxy natively supports the Model Context Protocol, letting you connect characters to external tools and APIs — live documentation servers, Git repositories, Slack, Jira, GitHub, or custom internal scripts.

Servers are configured in =Preferences= → =MCP= and boot lazily: Boxxy caches available tools at startup but only spawns the background process when a tool is actually needed, keeping terminal startup instant even with dozens of servers configured.

See MCP for setup instructions.

Characters can search the web in real time using Tavily, a search provider optimized for LLMs. Toggle web search per character from the Globe Icon in the message bar, or set it globally in =Preferences= → =Characters=.

Your terminal history and file contents are never sent to the search provider — only the query itself. See Web Search.

🔗Resume Sessions

Press Ctrl+/ and type /resume to restore any of your last 10 sessions — or any pinned session — into any terminal pane. Boxxy stores history locally in SQLite and rehydrates the full sidebar, context analytics, and working directory.

Because resumption is stateless, you can start a session with one model and continue it with another. The new model reads the transcript and picks up without interruption.

🔗Reminders & Bookmarks

Reminders: Ask your character to remind you of something ("remind me to check the deploy in 20 minutes") and they will send a native notification on time. Reminders are scoped per pane and cancelled automatically when you close it.

Bookmarks: Save Python or shell scripts in =Bookmarks= (accessible from the Command Palette). Use {{{my_var}}} syntax to define runtime variables — Boxxy will prompt for inputs when you invoke the script. All bookmarks are stored locally at ~/.config/boxxy-terminal/bookmarks.

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