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COSMIC DE: The Road to Alpha

blog.system76.com COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

Introducing COSMIC Terminal, and what’s left on the roadmap for COSMIC DE?

COSMIC: The Road to Alpha

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/8455606

If all goes well, we can release the alpha by the end of March

Now Available on NixOS!

COSMIC Terminal joins a long list of COSMIC DE projects that have been packaged for NixOS! While COSMIC DE will be the flagship desktop for Pop!_OS, it's designed and architected for distros to build their own custom, branded user experiences. Details for distro packaging will be released at the same time as the alpha.

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5 comments

  • I wonder why they thought it necessary to build a new terminal emulator instead of just skin and contribute to alacritty or wezterm

    • Development began mid-December, using the work we already did for cosmic-edit as a template. COSMIC Terminal uses the alacritty library, but the frontend interface is designed with our platform toolkit (libcosmic), with full support for bidrectional text and ligatures because we use cosmic-text instead of freetype.

      https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111602927867586005

      You can see above that between alacritty, cosmic-terminal, and gnome-terminal; cosmic-terminal was the only terminal to render correctly. Since then, we've given it the COSMIC treatment and now we have a tabbed interface with settings, search, etc.

      https://fosstodon.org/@soller/111733526892594130

      We're still in the process of designing and implementing features, but don't hesitate to try it out!

    • Kinda seems like they want to have close integration with the rest of the desktop environment and Pop_OS but still remain modular by using the alacritty_terminal framework. I'm sure they are mostly concerned with performance on the System76 laptop hardware.

      We built a terminal application for COSMIC DE. COSMIC Terminal (cosmic-term) features bidirectional rendering (left-right and right-left languages), ligatures (æ, for example), desktop themes, syntax themes, and GPU rendering. This terminal emulator was built using the alacritty_terminal framework with a custom renderer based on COSMIC Text, while GPU rendering uses glyphon and wgpu with softbuffer and tiny-skia as a fallback. We were able to optimize this to have performance similar to Alacritty; both in vtebench and when displaying an 8 MB text file.

      We’re working on adding mouse emulation and the ability to open hyperlinks in the terminal, as well as ironing out a few wrinkles.

  • I got confused by this post a bit. The news is just about Terminal being packaged for Nix. Checking the whole list, it looks like only the Session is not merged yet? I wonder if it's the moment where I would be able to write:

    services.xserver.desktopManager.cosmic.enable = true