Edge reveal
A whisper-thin hot zone on your chosen edge. Dwell for a beat and the terminal glides in on a hand-tuned spring — no jitter, no jank.
Free & open source for macOS
Your terminal,
one edge away.
Nudge your mouse to the screen edge — the terminal glides in. Move away — it glides out. Your sessions never die.
0accessibility permissions
<1%idle CPU
10live sessions on the shelf
100%native AppKit
Built to disappear.
Engineered to endure.
Every detail obsessed over — from the spring curve of the reveal to the survival of your SSH session.
Sessions never die
Hiding never touches the pty. Claude CLI, SSH, tmux, six-hour builds — everything keeps running while the terminal waits offscreen.
Session shelf
Keep up to ten live sessions and switch instantly from the menu bar — each returns with its full scrollback and running programs.
Intelligent hiding
It reads the room: never hides while you type, select, scroll, or drag. Hysteresis and re-checks stop accidental vanishing.
Live native settings
Theme, blur, opacity, fonts, cursor — applied the instant you touch them. A real macOS shortcut recorder refuses taken combos.
Honest engine
Rendering, input, and escape handling come from a battle-tested open-source terminal core. SideTerminal perfects the ritual around it.
Three seconds to muscle memory.
01
Nudge the edge
Push your pointer against the left or right edge of the screen. That's the whole gesture.
02
Work in the glass
A translucent card springs in with your live session — run, build, ask, deploy.
03
Walk away
Move on and it slips offscreen. Everything keeps running until you come back.
Install in a minute.
- Download the DMG and drag SideTerminal into Applications.
- It's open source and unsigned, so allow it once:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SideTerminal.app
Or: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Requires macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon.