DEV Community: Yash Ambaskar

I built a <10MB AI-Native Terminal using Rust 🦀 (and you can run it 100% locally)

Yash Ambaskar — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:30:09 +0000

Let's be honest: modern developer tools are getting bloated.

I love the AI features of next-gen terminals and editors, but I was getting tired of the fact that every new tool seemed to be an Electron app that consumes 1GB of RAM just to idle in the background. On top of that, I was increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of streaming my terminal output to cloud APIs just to get a command prediction.

So, I decided to build my own.

Meet NovaTerm—a blazing fast, open-source terminal workspace built with Rust and Tauri v2.

novitaswebworks / novaterm

NovaTerm – An open-source, <10MB Tauri terminal with local AI

NovaTerm

A Next-Generation, AI-Native Terminal Workspace

Built by Novitas WebWorks

⚡ Overview

NovaTerm is a high-performance, lightweight, and extensible AI-native terminal emulator designed for modern workflows. Built on top of Tauri v2 (Rust) and React 19, it brings together a fully functional native PTY backend with a blazingly fast WebGL renderer.

Instead of juggling multiple tools, NovaTerm unifies your workspace:

💻 Native Terminal: High-performance rendering via xterm.js and Rust's portable-pty.
🤖 Agentic AI: A built-in AI side-panel that can read your project context, write files, and safely execute bash commands with your approval.
📝 Code Editor: Built-in editor powered by CodeMirror, complete with syntax highlighting and multi-file editing.
📁 File Explorer: Visual file management, Git graphs, and source control integration right next to your command line.

Weighing in at under 10MB on disk, it is lightweight, lightning-fast (300ms cold start), and deeply customizable.

✨ Features

Blazing Fast: Written…

View on GitHub

Here’s a breakdown of how I built it, the architecture choices, and how you can run AI models inside it entirely offline. 👇

🛑 The Problem with Electron Terminals

When you open an Electron-based terminal, you are essentially booting up a full instance of Chromium and Node.js.

To solve this, I used Tauri v2. Tauri doesn't bundle a browser; it hooks directly into your operating system's native webview (WKWebView on Mac, WebView2 on Windows).

By writing the core logic in Rust, the compiled NovaTerm binary sits at under 10MB. Better yet, the cold start time is around 300ms. It opens the moment you click it.

🧠 Privacy-First AI via Ollama

The coolest part of NovaTerm isn't just the speed—it's the AI integration.

Instead of hardcoding a dependency on OpenAI, NovaTerm is designed to integrate seamlessly with Ollama and LM Studio.

Here is what happens when you hook it up to a local model (like Llama 3 or deepseek-coder):

Ghost-Text Predictions: As you type a complex Docker or Git command, the local AI predicts the rest of your command in real-time.
AI Tutor Mode: If a command fails and throws an error, you can hit Cmd+Shift+L. The AI instantly reads the PTY output and explains exactly what went wrong.

Because inference happens on your own GPU, there is zero network latency, and absolutely zero data leaves your machine. (Though you can still plug in your OpenAI API key if you want to Bring Your Own Key!).

📝 A Built-in Code Editor

Context switching kills productivity. How many times have you been in the terminal and needed to edit a single line in a .env file or a .gitignore? Usually, you either wrestle with nano/vim or wait 5 seconds for VSCode to launch.

I embedded CodeMirror 6 natively into the UI. It sits right next to your terminal session with full syntax highlighting, a visual file tree, and multi-file editing. You get the speed of the CLI with the comfort of a GUI editor, all in one pane.

🚀 The Tech Stack Overview

If you're curious about the exact architecture:

• Backend: Rust + portable-pty (for native pseudo-terminal process management).
• Frontend Wrapper: Tauri v2
• UI: React 19 + Tailwind CSS
• Terminal Rendering: xterm.js with the WebGL add-on (hardware-accelerated GPU rendering).
• Editor: CodeMirror 6

Let me know what you think! 💬

NovaTerm is completely open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. I built this for developers who care about performance and privacy as much as I do.

You can download the installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux right here:
👉 https://novaterm.novitasweb.works

If you give it a try, please let me know what you think in the comments below! What local model do you plan on using it with? ***

I got tired of juggling htop and lazydocker, so I built a unified Terminal Dashboard in Rust 🦀

Yash Ambaskar — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:55:11 +0000

Let me know if this sounds familiar:

You're trying to debug why your local development stack is suddenly crawling. You open a terminal tab and run htop to find a runaway Node process. Then you open another tab and launch lazydocker to see if your Postgres container is crashing. Finally, you open a third tab to use systemctl to restart a background service.

As developers, we spend our entire day context-switching between 3 or 4 different terminal utilities just to keep our local environments
running.

I got frustrated with this workflow. I wanted a single "God Mode" dashboard that brought processes, Docker containers, and system services under one roof. So, I built nman (Novitas Manager).

What is nman?

nman is a blazing-fast, cross-platform (macOS & Linux) Terminal User Interface (TUI) written entirely in Rust. It replaces the need to jump between multiple CLI tools by giving you a unified, interactive dashboard.

Here are the features I’m most proud of:

### 1. The Global Fuzzy Command Palette (Press :)

My favorite feature. From anywhere in the app, you can press the colon (:) to open a fuzzy-finder command palette. If you type "kill node" or "logs nginx," nman instantly figures out what domain (process, container, or service) you are talking about and executes the command. No more hunting through lists.

### 2. The Dynamic Process Tree (Press T)

Standard process lists can be overwhelming. By pressing T, nman instantly indents child processes under their parents. Now you can actually understand why a process is running (e.g., seeing all your Chrome helper threads neatly tucked under the main browser process).

### 3. Interactive Log Filtering (Press /)

When you are streaming live logs for a Docker container, it can be like drinking from a firehose. In nman, you can just press / and type
"error." The UI will instantly filter the live log stream to only show lines matching your query.

### 4. Full Mouse Support

TUIs are great, but sometimes you just want to click. nman has 100% mouse support right out of the box. You can click tabs, scroll through your process lists with your mouse wheel, and smoothly scroll through logs without touching your keyboard.

## 🛠️ The Tech Stack

If you're curious about how it was built under the hood, I used the following:

• Rust: For memory safety and minimal resource footprint (a system monitor shouldn't consume all your resources!).
• Ratatui: The absolute best Rust library for building rich terminal interfaces.
• sysinfo: For pulling cross-platform (Mac & Linux) CPU, memory, and process metrics.
• Bollard: An asynchronous Rust client for the Docker API.

## Try it out! 🚀

I wanted to make the installation friction as close to zero as possible. If you use Homebrew, you can install it in seconds:

brew install novitaswebworks/tap/proc-manager

Once installed, just type nman in your terminal!

(If you don't use Homebrew, there is a curl installer available on the GitHub repo).

Feedback Welcome!

I built this tool to solve my own itch, but I'd love to know what the community thinks. Check out the source code on GitHub and drop a star if you find it useful, and let me know in the comments what features you'd like to see next!

🔗 GitHub Repository: novitaswebworks/proc-manager https://github.com/novitaswebworks/proc-manager***

Stop Writing YAML: Deploy a Production Observability Stack in 1 Command 🚀

Yash Ambaskar — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:04:28 +0000

Setting up Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager usually involves hundreds of lines of YAML and manual wiring. InfraPulse fixes this by embedding the entire configuration into a single Go binary.

Key Highlights:

📦 Zero-Config: One binary, one command (infrapulse start).
🛠️ Self-Healing: Built-in automated remediation. If your disk hits 90%, it clears Docker artifacts before you even wake up.
🔍 Drift Detection: Verify your infrastructure integrity with infrapulse check.
📡 Multi-Server Ready: Generate remote agent scripts in seconds.

You can find the project at: https://github.com/ambaskaryash/infrapulse
Check out how we're making enterprise observability accessible to everyone!

#DevOps #Monitoring #Golang #OpenSource #Prometheus #Grafana

I replaced the `man` command with a Python TUI — and it's actually useful

Yash Ambaskar — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:07:48 +0000

We've all been there.

You're deep in a terminal session, you forget a flag, so you type man grep — and you're greeted by this:

GREP(1)                   General Commands Manual                   GREP(1)

NAME
     grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines that match patterns
...

A wall of monospaced text. No color. No structure. No examples surfaced upfront.

So I built SmartMan CLI — a drop-in, interactive replacement for man that actually respects your eyes and your time.

What it looks like

What it does differently

Feature	`man`	`smartman`
Syntax highlighting	❌	✅
Interactive sidebar (jump to sections)	❌	✅
Quick-win examples at the top	❌	✅
AI-powered plain-English explanations	❌	✅
Themes (Dracula, Catppuccin, Nord…)	❌	✅

Features I'm actually proud of

⚡ Quick-Win Gallery

The most painful thing about man pages is that the useful examples are always buried at the bottom.

SmartMan surfaces the most common usage patterns as interactive cards right at the top of every page. No scrolling, no grep-ing through the man page to find what you need.

🤖 AI Explanations (via Groq)

Staring at a complex flag description and still confused? Run:

smartman --explain awk

It hits the Groq API (sub-second response, free tier available) and gives you a plain-English summary of what the command actually does — no more decoding formal specification language at 2am.

📂 Interactive Sidebar

Jump between NAME, SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION, OPTIONS, and EXAMPLES instantly using keyboard shortcuts:

Key	Action
`n`	Jump to NAME
`s`	Jump to SYNOPSIS
`d`	Jump to DESCRIPTION
`o`	Jump to OPTIONS
`e`	Jump to EXAMPLES
`q`	Quit

🎨 Theming

Built on YAML-based themes, so you can match your exact terminal aesthetic:

Default — Modern dark blue
Dracula — Classic dev
Catppuccin — Pastel mocha
Nord — Cool-toned frost
Monokai — High-contrast vibrant

smartman --theme dracula grep

Install it in one line

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ambaskaryash/smartman-cli/main/install.sh | bash

Or via pipx if you prefer:

pipx install smartman

Then, to make it your permanent default man command, add this to your .bashrc or .zshrc:

alias man='smartman'

Now every time you type man <command>, you get the full SmartMan experience automatically.

The stack

Textual — The TUI framework that makes all the interactive UI possible. If you haven't tried it yet, it's genuinely impressive what you can build in pure Python.
Rich — Powers the syntax highlighting and styled rendering.
Groq API — For the AI explanations. Chosen specifically for its near-zero latency — it doesn't feel like waiting for an AI.
Typer — Clean CLI interface with zero boilerplate.

What's next

[ ] Fuzzy search across all installed man pages
[ ] Bookmarking frequently-used man pages
[ ] --tldr mode (shorter, community-sourced summaries)
[ ] Export to PDF

Try it out

The full source code is on GitHub:

👉 github.com/ambaskaryash/smartman-cli

If this saves you even a few seconds of squinting at man pages, a ⭐ on the repo would mean a lot — it helps other Linux users discover it too.

Contributions are very welcome, especially new themes. Adding one is as simple as dropping a YAML file into smartman/themes/.

What's the most annoying thing about the default man command for you? Drop it in the comments — I'm actively looking for what to build next. 👇