I got tired of juggling apps in my workflow, so I built Termo

Some time ago I started going to a code-and-coffee meetup.

Every week we'd get together, share ideas, and show off projects we'd been working on — and it's been a genuinely great experience. From the very first meetup, one thing stood out to me: almost everyone was building something to solve a problem they ran into every single day.

That got me thinking. What if I built something to fix a problem in my own workflow?

So I looked at how I actually spend my day. I write a lot of code. I interact with AI agents. I share notes. I lean on a bunch of CLI tools. And most of the time, I'm bouncing between multiple projects spread across multiple apps — a terminal here, an editor there, a file browser somewhere else, notes in yet another window.

Individually, each of these tools is great. The problem only shows up when I stop living in one of them and start jumping between all of them — and for me, that's basically all the time. The context-switching tax was real. So I decided to name the problem, categorize it, and actually handle it.

And that's how Termo was born.

What Termo is ?

Termo is a native terminal and file workspace that puts the pieces I was juggling into a single window:

• A real integrated terminal (a proper PTY — scrollback, mouse, inline graphics), not a toy.
• A tabbed editor and a file explorer with inline preview.
• Recursive split panes where each pane can mix shells and editor tabs — drag a tab into another pane to move or re-split it.
• A scripts, snippets, and notes library built right in, so the things I reuse aren't scattered across apps.
• It's agent-aware: it detects the AI coding-agent CLIs running in my terminals and lets me jump straight back to a session — which matters a lot when I've got a few going at once.

Under the hood it's a single Rust binary on an immediate-mode GUI — no Electron, no webview — so it starts fast and stays light.

Try it

One line, no dependencies to set up:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swavan/plugins/main/install-termo.sh | sh

Windows:
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swavan/plugins/main/install-termo.ps1 | iex

More details here: https://cli.swavan.io/termo.html

It's still early, and it's the tool I wanted — but I'd love to know if it scratches the same itch for you. If you try it, tell me what's missing or what breaks. That feedback is exactly what these meetups taught me to chase.