liney-win

A terminal workspace for Windows — keep your repositories, worktrees, splits, and tabs in a single window.

A Windows take on macOS liney. Terminal core is Ghostty's libghostty-vt; the UI is fully self-drawn Win32 / Direct2D. Builds with MSVC + Zig.

English · 中文

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Why liney-win?

A normal terminal gives you tabs. liney-win gives you a workspace. Your git repos and their worktrees live in the sidebar, every project carries its own icon, the folder tree follows whatever pane you're typing in, and your whole split layout comes back exactly as you left it. It's the multi-repo, multi-pane cockpit that Windows never shipped — drawn from scratch, so it starts instantly and depends on nothing but the OS.

✨ Features

🖥️ Terminal — powered by Ghostty's libghostty-vt core

• Full VT parsing: cursor / erase / scroll regions / insert-delete, SGR 16/256/truecolor rendered with bold/italic/underline/inverse/faint/strike, UTF-8, wide (CJK) glyphs, grapheme clusters
• Scrollback (wheel · Shift+PgUp) with reflow of long lines on resize
• Alternate screen — vim / less / git log just work, and the mouse wheel scrolls them (arrow keys are sent when the alt screen is active)
• Cursor — DECSCUSR block / bar / underline shapes (vim mode-switching), blinking per terminal modes, hollow when the pane is unfocused, OSC 12 color
• Mouse reporting — vim (:set mouse=a) / htop / mc receive clicks, drags and the wheel (SGR + legacy protocols); hold Shift to select text locally instead
• OSC-driven window title and cwd tracking (the file tree follows your shell)
• Selection + copy/paste — buffer-anchored (the highlight stays on its text while you scroll or output streams in), drag-select, double-click word / triple-click line, copy-on-select (opt-in), right-click menu, Ctrl+V / Shift+Insert paste, bracketed paste, an opt-out multi-line paste confirm; IME (CJK) with the candidate window at the cursor
• Find (Ctrl+F) — highlights every match in view and searches the whole scrollback: Enter/F3 jump match-to-match up through history, Shift+Enter walks back down
• Fonts — pick any monospace family + size in Settings, or zoom via Ctrl +/-/0 / Ctrl+Wheel; all remembered across launches
• Themes — 7 built-in presets (Emerald / Azure / Violet Night, Amber Dark, Rose Dark, Slate Frost, Paper Light), a live-preview theme dropdown, and a custom accent color picker for the active-pane divider / tab — plus full fg/bg + 16-color ANSI overrides for power users
• Unix tools — with Git for Windows installed, ls / cat / grep / rm / sed / awk / … work in any shell

🗂️ Workspace — liney's differentiator

• Tabs (with a × close button and right-click close to the right / left / others / all) + binary splits (drag dividers to resize, drag tabs to reorder), Alt+Arrows to move focus
• Pane zoom (Ctrl+Shift+Z) maximizes the focused pane; Equalize (Ctrl+Shift+E) evens them out — so a deep split layout stays workable
• A repository sidebar with per-project icons, expandable to worktrees
• Manage projects: the WORKSPACE + adds a project folder; right-click a project for New worktree… / Set icon… / Remove from workspace (persisted)
• A right-side folder tree that follows the focused pane
• SSH hosts and agent sessions, each with its own icon, one click to open
• Layout persistence — tabs + split tree + per-pane cwd restored next launch

⚡ Built-in tooling

• A top-right ☰ menu: keep-awake · settings · check-for-updates · report-an-issue
• Settings… dialog — click-to-configure shell, font & size, theme & accent, scrollback, workspace root, copy-on-select, paste warning, Unix tools; applied live and saved without disturbing hand-edited keys (config.json stays fully editable too)
• Keep awake (Ctrl+Shift+K) — block system/display sleep for 1 / 2 / 3 / 6 / 24 hours or until turned off, with the remaining time in the menu
• Git: Ctrl+Shift+L/G open git log / git diff in a new tab
• Notifications: a liney notify CLI + OSC 9/777 → Windows tray balloons
• Lifecycle hooks on session start/exit and app exit
• Auto-update from GitHub releases (Ctrl+Shift+U)

📸 Screenshots

Workspace + sidebar	Split panes

📦 Install

Download — from the Releases page:

File	Description
liney-win-setup.exe	Installer — per-user, no admin, Start Menu + uninstall
liney-win-portable.zip	Portable — unzip and run Liney.exe

Build from source — Windows 10 1809+/11, with:

• Visual Studio 2022 Desktop C++ (bundles CMake ≥ 3.20 + Ninja)
• Zig 0.15.2 on PATH — the terminal core is built from Ghostty via Zig

# in the "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022", with zig on PATH
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\build.ps1
.\build\Liney.exe

tools\build.ps1 configures + builds and points Zig's cache at the build drive (a Zig 0.15.2 quirk panics when the source and cache are on different drives). The first build fetches Ghostty and compiles libghostty-vt, so it takes a while; ghostty-vt.dll is copied next to the exe automatically.

Prefer raw CMake? cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build — but set ZIG_GLOBAL_CACHE_DIR to a folder on the build drive first.

⌨️ Shortcuts

Key	Action
Ctrl+Shift+T / Ctrl+Shift+W	New tab / close current pane
Alt+D / Shift+Alt+D	Split side by side (left∣right) / stacked (top/bottom)
Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab	Next / previous tab
Ctrl+1…Ctrl+8 / Ctrl+9	Jump to tab N / last tab
Alt+Arrows	Move focus between split panes
Ctrl+Shift+B / Ctrl+Shift+F	Toggle the left sidebar / right files panel
Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V	Copy selection / paste
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V	Copy when text is selected (else ^C) / paste
Shift+Insert / Ctrl+Insert	Paste / copy selection
Ctrl+Shift+A	Select all (scrollback included)
Ctrl+F · Enter/F3 · Shift+Enter · Esc	Find · older match (searches scrollback) · newer match · close
Shift+click/drag	Select locally while an app (vim/htop) captures the mouse
Ctrl++ / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 · Ctrl+Wheel	Zoom font in / out / reset · zoom
Ctrl+Shift+L / Ctrl+Shift+G	git log / git diff for the current repo
Ctrl+Shift+K	Keep awake (block sleep) on / off
Ctrl+Shift+U	Check for & install updates
Wheel · Shift+PgUp/PgDn/Home/End	Scroll through scrollback
Mouse	Switch tab · focus pane · expand repo · open worktree/SSH/agent · drag to select (auto-scrolls past the edge) · double/triple-click word/line · right-click a pane for copy/paste/find · drag to resize / reorder · right-click a worktree to manage

⚙️ Configuration

The first run writes %USERPROFILE%\.liney\config.json (mirroring macOS liney's ~/.liney/; full sample in config.example.json):

{
  "shell": "cmd.exe",
  "fontFamily": "Cascadia Mono",
  "fontSize": 16,
  "workspaceRoot": "",
  "unixTools": true,
  "copyOnSelect": false,
  "multiLinePasteWarning": true,
  "hooks": { "sessionStart": "", "sessionExit": "", "appExit": "" },
  "sshHosts": ["user@host"],
  "agents": [{ "name": "agent", "command": "claude", "cwd": "" }],
  "projectIcons": { "my-repo": "C:\\path\\to\\icon.png" },
  "theme": { "background": "#102840", "foreground": "#e8e8d0", "palette": ["#000000", "..."] }
}

Key	Meaning
shell	Shell for new tabs (powershell.exe / pwsh.exe / wsl.exe; wsl tmux for tmux)
workspaceRoot	Directory scanned for repos; empty = the launch directory's parent
unixTools	Append Git's usr\bin to PATH so ls/cat/grep/… work
copyOnSelect	Copy to the clipboard as soon as a selection ends (PuTTY-style)
multiLinePasteWarning	Confirm before pasting text with line breaks (each break runs as Enter)
fontFamily / fontSize	Terminal font; the ☰ → Font… picker, Ctrl +/-/0 and Ctrl+Wheel update and persist them
scrollback	History lines retained per session (default 10000)
sshHosts / agents	Entries in the sidebar SSH / AGENTS sections
projectIcons	Per-repo sidebar icons (else a repo-local icon.png/logo.png)
theme	Terminal fg/bg + the 16-color ANSI palette
hooks	Commands run on session start/exit and app exit

The window layout is saved to %USERPROFILE%\.liney\layout.json and restored on the next launch.

🔔 liney CLI & notifications

A companion CLI Liney.exe ships with the app; run it in a pane to drive the terminal over OSC (mirrors macOS liney's liney notify):

liney notify <body>            # Windows tray notification
liney notify <title> <body>
liney title  <text>            # set the tab/window title

Put Liney.exe on PATH and liney notify "done" pings you when a long task finishes. The terminal also parses OSC 0/2 (title), 7 (cwd), 9 and 777;notify (notifications).

🏗️ Architecture

keyboard/mouse → Window (workspace orchestration) → routes to the focused pane
                 ↑ composes sidebar · tab strip · split tree · files panel · toolbar
TerminalSession = Terminal + ConPty + Grid
   ConPty      — Windows pseudoconsole (spawn shell, read/write, resize)
   Terminal    — wraps libghostty-vt (Ghostty's VT engine): PTY bytes → render
                 snapshot → Grid; selection / find / mouse encoding via its C API
   D2DRenderer — Direct2D/DirectWrite draws the Grid + chrome; glyphs rasterize
                 once into an atlas and draw as tinted opacity masks

Source map in src/. Design / research notes: RESEARCH.md, ALT_PLAN_SELFBUILT.md, TERMINAL_LANDSCAPE.md; rendering plan: RENDERING.md.

🗺️ Roadmap

Done & remaining items (with a macOS-liney comparison) live in ROADMAP.md; per-release changes in CHANGELOG.md. Still pending: SFTP remote file tree, native tmux control-mode, a D3D11 shader-based renderer. (Mouse reporting needs a ConPTY that passes mouse-mode requests through — Windows 11 / recent Windows 10.)

🤝 Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the full setup. The one thing to get right: the build needs Zig 0.15.2 (not 0.16.x) to compile the libghostty-vt core. The codebase is plain C++20 + Win32 + Direct2D, split into small, cohesive files (see src/); please match the surrounding style.

🙏 Acknowledgements

• liney by @everettjf — the macOS original this follows, and the source of the app icon.
• Ghostty — provides libghostty-vt, liney-win's terminal core (built from Ghostty via Zig).

📄 License

Apache-2.0 — same as liney.