Wave – Modern Open-Source Terminal (macOS and Linux)
Hi HN, I’m Mike, the founder and creator of Wave, a cross-platform open-source terminal that supports inline rendering, modern UI, and persistent sessions. I love the command line; I’ve been using it for over 25 years, starting with a Linux box I made with spare parts in my college dorm room. But while other devtools have been modernized, the terminal has been stuck, with the same basic functionality for over 40-years. What if your command line terminal could display more than just text? That’s crazy right (I can hear the screams of thousands of graybeard sysadmins). Not all the time, but…
In plain words
Wave is an open-source terminal for macOS and Linux that modernizes the command line with inline rendering capabilities, persistent sessions, and a contemporary interface. It allows users to display more than plain text, including Markdown, images, CSVs, and code editors with syntax highlighting directly in the terminal. Designed for developers and command-line users, Wave brings decades-overdue improvements to a tool that has remained largely unchanged since the early 1980s.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I’m Mike, the founder and creator of Wave, a cross-platform open-source terminal that supports inline rendering, modern UI, and persistent sessions. I love the command line; I’ve been using it for over 25 years, starting with a Linux box I made with spare parts in my college dorm room. But while other devtools have been modernized, the terminal has been stuck, with the same basic functionality for over 40-years. What if your command line terminal could display more than just text? That’s crazy right (I can hear the screams of thousands of graybeard sysadmins). Not all the time, but maybe just when you want it to. Like displaying Markdown, Images, ChatGPT output, or CSVs (that you can copy from and paste directly into Excel). Or running a VSCode style editor inline in your terminal that has mouse support, copy/paste, indentation, and syntax highlighting support right out of the box for when you need to edit your remote .bashrc file. That’s why I built Wave, to keep what’s best about the command line while adding the power of the open web. Wave has inline renderers for terminal content and remote files to help keep you in flow and reduce context switches. We have 5 initial plugins: remote file editor, markdown viewer, image viewer, CSV viewer, and a ChatGPT interface, with more coming soon. We’re proudly built on Electron (just like VSCode, Slack, and Discord) with all of the network code and heavy lifting done in a local Go backend. This enables us to deliver a consistent cross-platform experience and the ability to leverage high-quality web components for our UI and plugins. Openness is a core part of our mission. Our code is open source (Apache 2.0), and our plugins are written in TypeScript/React. We don’t require an email, login, or payment to use our terminal (it is free as in speech and as in beer). We’re also proud to be shipping a Linux version of Wave alongside the MacOS version (with a Windows WSL port coming soon). Yes, we do plan on making money in the future, through opt-in team collaboration features. Basic rule of thumb is if it runs on your own computer with your own resources it will be free, if it hits our servers using our resources it will be paid. But Wave isn’t just a simple renderer trick. We’ve been working on Wave for over a year and have over 1200 commits. We’re on a mission to improve terminal DevEx across the board and fix all sorts of terminal micro-frustrations. Wave manages your remote SSH connections, seamlessly restoring sessions, persisting sessions, and giving you a searchable contextual history of all the commands you’ve run, across all of your sessions and remote machines. If you’re interested, please give it a try and give us a Star on Github to show your support for Open Source! Feedback, bugs, feature requests, and contributions are all welcome. Happy Hacking! https://www.waveterm.dev | https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm
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