Corta

Corta is a native macOS terminal built in Swift. It is made for people who live in the terminal: crisp text, native input, and remote workflows that feel like part of the Mac rather than something bolted on.

Why I Built This

I spend most of my day in a terminal, and I type in both English and Chinese. Many terminals treat CJK input and IME composition as an afterthought, and many treat macOS as just another platform to support. I wanted a terminal that goes through AppKit instead of around it, and that is fast enough to prove it with numbers.

Technical Highlights

• Metal 4 rendering with Core Text font fallback
• Native Mac input: CJK input and IME composition, VoiceOver, Secure Keyboard Entry, Services, Quick Terminal, and Shortcuts actions
• Measured performance: 2.3× the core throughput of v1.1, a frame less of full-screen input latency, and 11 MiB instead of 185 MiB for 100,000 lines of history, each figure published with its method and its gaps
• Zero-dependency terminal core written in Swift, with resource limits for untrusted output and a sandboxed image decoder
• Security by omission: clipboard reads and title queries are deliberately not supported

Features

• Split panes, scrollback search, and a command palette
• True colour, OSC 8 links, and the Kitty keyboard and graphics protocols
• Shell integration for zsh, bash, and fish, plus restored layouts
• System OpenSSH with your ~/.ssh/config
• A Finder-like SFTP browser with drag and drop
• Remote files opened in your local editor, with a conflict check before upload
• One settings store shared by the Settings window and ~/.config/corta/config
• Developer ID-signed, notarised releases with in-app updates

Development Timeline

Date	Version	Milestone
Sep 1	—	First commit
Sep 4	v0.1.0	First release
Oct 19	v1.2.3	Latest release, 15 releases in 7 weeks

Corta requires macOS 26 on Apple silicon. Downloads are on GitHub Releases.