Building Terax from Source on an Intel Mac

Warp was my favorite for a long time, but as new features were added it gradually became heavier, so I switched to Ghostty. I like Ghostty because it lets you use fragment shaders you’ve written yourself as the background. After that, I tried Cmux, which is based on Ghostty and lets you do even more, and I used it for about a month. However, its RAM usage turned out to be much higher than I expected, so I was thinking I might go back to iTerm2 when I discovered Terax on Better Stack.

Unfortunately, Terax doesn’t provide a build for Intel Macs, so I built it myself. In this article, I’ll walk through the steps I took.

My Terminal History

1. Terminal app

2. iTerm 2 (still using)
   

   iterm2.com

3. Warp
   

   

   Warp — Open Infrastructure for Cloud Software Factories

   Build your software factory on Warp: factories as code, any model or harness, with evals, benchmarks, and self-improvement built in.

   warp.dev

4. Ghostty
   

   

   Ghostty

   Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

   ghostty.org

5. Cmux
   

   

   cmux - The terminal built for multitasking

   Free and open source macOS terminal for AI coding agents. Works with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Kiro, Aider, and any CLI tool.

   cmux.com

6. Terax ← now
   

   

   Terax - Terminal-first AI-native dev workspace

   Terax is a lightweight AI terminal with a built-in editor, AI agents, voice input, and live web preview. 7 MB on disk, 300 ms cold start. Free and open source. BYOK or fully local via LM Studio.

   terax.app

I loved Warp but

A lightweight AI terminal with a built-in editor, AI agents, and live web preview. 7 MB on disk. 300 ms cold start. BYOK or fully local.

my current

You can set an image as the background as well as other Terminal apps but Terax is lighter and faster than them 😎

crynta / terax-ai

Lightweight (7MB) terminal-first AI-native devevelopment environment

Terax

Lightweight Terminal-first AI-native dev workspace.

Website · Docs · Website's source code

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Terax is a lightweight open-source terminal-first AI-native development environment (ADE) built on Tauri 2 + Rust and React 19. A native PTY backend with a WebGL renderer, an agentic AI side-panel that runs against your own keys or fully local models, plus a code editor, file explorer, source control with a git graph, and a web preview pane built in. About 7-8 MB on disk. No telemetry. No account.

Note

Over the past few months, most of my development time went into building Zephium, a new browser-native work environment rebuilt for humans and agents.

Terax is now returning to active development. A major v0.9.0 update is already in progress, with some substantial architectural changes…

View on GitHub

Building Terax from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable) — install via rustup
• Node.js 20+
• pnpm v10 — install via mise (recommended) or directly
• Platform prerequisites from Tauri's getting started guide

Install pnpm v10 via mise or npm

mise install pnpm@10.32.1
mise use pnpm@10.32.1

# npm
npm i -g pnpm

Development build

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Production build

macOS — Intel (x86_64)

rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build --target x86_64-apple-darwin

Output: src-tauri/target/x86_64-apple-darwin/release/bundle/macos/Terax.app

Notes

• The first build takes 20–40 minutes as Rust compiles all dependencies from scratch. Subsequent builds use the cache and are much faster.
• DMG creation requires macOS system tools (hdiutil). If the DMG step fails, the Terax.app bundle is still usable — copy it to /Applications or run it directly.
• Code signing is optional for local builds. The CI uses Apple certificates and notarization for release builds.