crow-term

A terminal, and the things that live in it.

This README is honest about the gap between the two: what we are building toward is a monorepo of Rust apps that share one terminal, one agent protocol and one theme. What exists today is one of those apps — an ACP client TUI — plus a set of sibling checkouts that are not yet part of anything. Neither half is finished, and the parts that are finished still carry branding from the project this one was forked out of.

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What we are building toward

One terminal emulator, and a set of first-party apps that ship inside it, preinstalled and preconfigured. You do not assemble this stack; you get it, and you get one theme selector that drives all of it.

name	what it is	where it comes from	license
crow-term	the terminal emulator itself — the base executable	fork of rio: frontends/rioterm for native, the wasm frontend for the browser	MIT
crow	the ACP client — talk to a coding agent inside the terminal	what the crow-term crate in this repo is today, renamed	MIT
murdr	a crow agent orchestrator: panes that keep running when you detach, per-pane agent state, several machines in one window	fork of herdr, rebranded and rebuilt around ACP instead of herdr's own socket API	Apache-2.0
starship	the shell prompt	starship/starship	ISC
fresh	the text editor	sinelaw/fresh	GPL-3.0-or-later
emeraldian	notes — an Obsidian-shaped TUI over a plain folder of Markdown	emeraldian, on its acp branch	GPL-3.0-or-later

The license column is not decoration. This crate is MIT; fresh and emeraldian are GPL-3.0-or-later. Vendoring either into a shared workspace, or linking them into one binary, changes what the result can be licensed as. Shipping them as separate executables that the terminal launches does not. That is an argument for keeping the monorepo a repo of independent binaries rather than one linked product, and it has not been decided either.

Structurally this becomes a monorepo with several crates that each compile to an app, rather than one binary crate. Whether a given component is forked into the tree or consumed as a library dependency is decided per component and is not decided yet — rio and herdr are the two we expect to fork, starship and fresh are the two we expect to depend on, and emeraldian is genuinely open.

The load-bearing idea is the theme. Every one of those apps has its own theme system today (rio's config, starship's palettes, fresh's themes, emeraldian's emeraldian-theme, this repo's tui-palette.v0). One selector has to reach all of them, which means either a shared palette format every app can read or a config writer that speaks each app's dialect. That work has not started.

None of the above is built. It is the direction, written down so the decisions below have something to be decided against.

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What exists today

This repo: crow-term v0.2.39

A pure-Rust binary crate. No Node, no npm, no plugin host — the JavaScript layer this project was forked out of is deleted, not dormant, and the git history is full of it.

cargo build --release -j 6      # -> target/release/crow-term
cargo test --locked             # the only gate

What it does: spawns an ACP agent as a child process over stdio and renders the conversation — streaming text, reasoning, tool calls, plans, token usage, images, persisted sessions. The protocol is negotiated, never declared: one union initialize goes out over the live channel and the response decides whether src/acp.rs (v1) or src/acp/v2.rs handles the connection. A harness is an argv, not a config schema.

• agent-client-protocol 2.0.0, behind unstable_protocol_v2
• ratatui 0.30.2 + crossterm 0.29, tui-markdown, syntect, ratatui-textarea, ratatui-explorer, tui-tree-widget
• settings at ~/.agents/crow/settings.json — patched, never rewritten; an unparseable file is quarantined rather than replaced
• 24 slash commands, catalogued in src/app/slash_catalog.rs
• 8 palettes in docs/fixtures/ against docs/tui-palette.v0.schema.json: ayu, catppuccin, everforest, iceberg, kanagawa, one, solarized, tomorrow
• tests/startup_session_e2e.rs drives the shipped binary on a real PTY against a stub ACP agent — that, not a mock, is how behaviour gets proven

Read AGENTS.md before changing anything. It is the list of constraints that have already bitten an agent — protocol negotiation, the single connection, the tokio runtime rule, the test layout.

The sibling checkouts

These live next to this repo under ../ and are not wired into it. No workspace, no shared build, no path dependencies.

directory	remote	branch	state
../rio	crow-cli/rio	main	forked, full workspace: sugarloaf, corcovado, teletypewriter, rio-vt, frontends/rioterm, frontends/wasm
../herdr	odellus/herdr	master	forked; upstream is v0.9.x, Apache-2.0
../emeraldian	odellus/emeraldian	acp	forked on an acp branch; workspace crates acp, emeraldian-core, emeraldian-theme, emeraldian-agent, emeraldian
../fresh	sinelaw/fresh	master	upstream clone, not forked
../starship	starship/starship	main	upstream clone, not forked
../crow-cli	crow-cli/crow-cli	main	the ACP agent crow-term talks to; Python, on PyPI

What is still vestigial here

Listed so nobody mistakes it for intent:

• src/theme.rs is a 1:1 map of DeepSeek's web design tokens, and src/deepseek_logo.rs and assets/martty-lockup.svg are still in the tree
• /plugins, /cordis-plugins, /ui and /liang are live slash commands pointing at a Cordis plugin host that no longer exists; src/cordis.rs and src/slots.rs are the same story
• src/locale.rs requires a Chinese description for every builtin command, so the command surface is bilingual by construction
• docs/composer-input.md is accurate and still in Chinese

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Docs

docs/README.md	index of what is left in docs/
AGENTS.md	the real constraints — protocol negotiation, the single connection, the tokio runtime rule, the test layout
docs/sessions.md	sessions, history, message queues
docs/composer-input.md	the input widget: every keybinding, and how it is wired
docs/tui-palette.v0.schema.json	the palette format, with docs/fixtures/*.v0.json as examples

The Martty-era docs — Cordis plugins, the dsh profile, the npm bundle, the Node migration plan, the harness CLI — have been deleted rather than left to mislead. They are in the git history.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.