Open your terminal. Now open Activity Monitor and check how much RAM your “modern” terminal is eating. If you’re using one of those AI-powered Electron-based terminals that came out in the last couple of years, the number is probably embarrassing: hundreds of megabytes on disk, a bundled Chromium runtime inside, and a privacy policy that almost always boils down to “just trust us.”
Terax makes the opposite bet. It’s an open-source AI terminal—the project calls it an ADE, an AI Development Environment—built on Tauri 2 + Rust on the backend and React 19 on the front. The whole package weighs in at around 7–8 MB on disk. No Electron, no telemetry, no account. And right now it’s sitting at 5.8K stars on GitHub and climbing fast.
The 7 MB number is the headline, but it’s not the point. The point is what fits inside.
First, it’s a real terminal
Many “AI terminals” are a chat box with a shell bolted to the side. Terax is the other way around: a native PTY backend (via portable-pty in Rust) with a WebGL renderer through xterm.js, multi-tab terminals, background streaming, shell integration, inline search, link detection, and true-color rendering. The terminal is the product; the AI lives alongside it, not on top of it.
Above the terminal you’ve got the rest of a workspace packed into those same 7 MB: an integrated code editor (CodeMirror 6, with language support for TS/JS, Rust, Python, Go, C/C++, Java and the usual suspects, plus Vim mode and ten built-in themes), a file explorer, version control with an actual git graph—stage/unstage hunks, commit with Cmd/Ctrl+Enter, push with upstream awareness—and a web preview panel. It’s closer to a lightweight IDE that boots instantly than to a terminal with extras.
The AI panel is agentic — and it’s yours
This is where Terax sets itself apart. The side panel isn’t autocomplete; it’s an agent. It plans, spins up sub-agents with names, each with its own system prompt and subset of tools, and maintains project memory in a TERAX.md file that lives in your repo—the same pattern users of Claude Code will recognize from CLAUDE.md. The agent has a real tool surface: file read / write / edit / multi-edit, grep, glob, and bash execution with approval gating, so it won’t run destructive commands behind your back.
And most importantly: it runs on your keys. Terax is BYOK with basically every provider that matters: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (Gemini), Groq, xAI (Grok), Cerebras, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Mistral—plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Want zero cloud? Point it at a local model via LM Studio, MLX, or Ollama and the AI never leaves your machine.
The privacy story is the quiet argument
For a lot of devs in the region, the BYOK-plus-local combination is the real reason to switch. There’s no Terax account to create, no telemetry phoning home, and your API keys get written to the OS keychain via keyring—they never touch disk or localStorage. The project’s own internal rules describe a deny-list of secret paths that apply to both read and write and that the AI’s tool surface can never bypass. For anyone working under compliance constraints, or who simply doesn’t want their prompts and keys in a vendor’s database, that’s a significantly different posture than the hosted alternatives.
Honest caveats
A couple of things worth knowing before you install. On Windows you’ll hit a SmartScreen warning on first launch (“Windows protected your PC”)—the project doesn’t have a code-signing certificate yet, so you click More info → Run anyway. It’s normal for unsigned open-source apps, but it’s friction. And Terax moves fast: it’s early (pre-1.0, the changelog shows frequent releases with stability fixes for things like window handling on Linux or Fish shell support), so expect rough edges and read the release notes before updating. The flip side of “shipping constantly” is that the bug that hits you today might already be fixed next week.
The stack, in case you’re curious: Tauri 2, Rust, portable-pty, React 19, TypeScript, Vite, xterm.js, CodeMirror 6, Vercel AI SDK v6, Tailwind v4, shadcn/ui, Zustand. Apache-2.0 license.
Should you try it?
If your current terminal is a memory hog, if you want an agentic AI workflow without handing your keys over to a SaaS, or if you just like the idea of a self-contained development workspace that fits in less space than a single phone photo—Terax deserves an afternoon. It won’t replace your full IDE on day one, and the friction of the unsigned binary is real. But the architectural bet being made here—native, lightweight, BYOK, local-first, no telemetry—is exactly the one many of us have been waiting for someone to make.