litty

A tiny macOS window for running long-lived commands.

Each window runs one command at a time through zsh and shows its output as plain text.

View on GitHub

Why

If you open a few windows, start one long command in each and leave them running, a full terminal is more than you need. litty uses about 50 MB for one idle window, where iTerm2 showed 156 MB on the same machine. It uses no CPU while idle.

What it does

• Your .zprofile, .zshrc, aliases and PATH work.
• History comes from ~/.zsh_history, and commands you run are added to it.
• cd carries over to the next command in the same window.
• The last 10,000 lines per window are kept.

What it doesn't do

litty is not a terminal emulator. It has no colors and no cursor control, and interactive programs like vim or htop won't work.

Install

You need macOS and Rust 1.85 or newer. Developed and tested on Apple Silicon; Intel Macs are untested.

git clone https://github.com/mgautam099/litty.git
cd litty
./make-app.sh

This builds litty and installs it to ~/Applications/litty.app. The first build takes a few minutes.