zinc

A Wayland terminal emulator written in Zig.

Keep in mind this is still experimental and you will surely find issues. If you report them in the issues I would really appreciate it and will work on the fix. I am doing this project to learn, not competing with other terminals, although zinc is faster in some tasks and has niche features.

Highlights

The cursor glides to its cell over 60ms instead of teleporting. Scrolling pours instead of jumping, with a scrollbar that fades when idle. Ctrl+click a file to open it in your editor, Ctrl+click a folder to cd into it, Shift+click to open the file manager. Images render inline through the Kitty graphics protocol, so tools like yazi show real previews. Fonts auto-discover with CJK and emoji fallback, and Ctrl+plus/minus zooms.

Everything lives in ~/.config/zinc/config, created on first launch and never rewritten. Tune cursor-glide-ms, smooth-scroll-ms, or scroll-step and restart.

If you want to see the full breakdown of everything zinc does, check features.md.

Dependencies

• Zig 0.17.0
• wayland-client
• libxkbcommon
• freetype2
• fontconfig
• hicolor-icon-theme

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S zig wayland libxkbcommon freetype2 fontconfig hicolor-icon-theme

Note: built with Zig 0.17.0.

Build

Build the release binary:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe

Run the binary:

./zig-out/bin/zinc

To compile-check without installing or running anything:

zig build check

Install

Arch Linux

Available on the AUR as zinc-term (release) or zinc-term-git (git):

paru -S zinc-term
# or
yay -S zinc-term

For the latest git master:

paru -S zinc-term-git
# or
yay -S zinc-term-git

From source

To install for your user only (no root required):

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix ~/.local
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

This installs the binary to ~/.local/bin/zinc and registers the desktop launcher, multi-res transparent icons, and AppStream metadata in ~/.local/share/.

Make sure ~/.local/bin is in your PATH:

• fish: fish_add_path ~/.local/bin
• bash / zsh: add export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

For system-wide installation:

sudo zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix /usr/local
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications

Uninstall

To uninstall, run the built-in uninstall command pointing to your prefix:

zig build uninstall -Duninstall-prefix=$HOME/.local
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

Or for system-wide installs:

sudo zig build uninstall -Duninstall-prefix=/usr/local
sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications

Your configuration at ~/.config/zinc/config stays untouched.