The terminal built only for macOS.
No cross-platform compromises. Damson is written in Swift with Metal and CoreText, targeting exactly one platform — so scrolling glides the way it does in Safari, Korean input never drops a syllable, and every frame is drawn on the GPU. Things that should be a given in a Mac app, finally a given in a terminal.
Download the latest release (.dmg)
macOS 13 Ventura or later · Notarized by Apple · Automatic updates built in
There are plenty of good terminals, but most of them are cross-platform apps. Built on the lowest common denominator of Linux, Windows, and macOS, they always feel slightly off on a Mac: trackpad momentum scrolling stutters, the first letter vanishes when you start typing Korean, and system shortcuts and menus don't behave like the rest of your apps.
Damson starts from the opposite end: it will never support any platform other than macOS. In exchange, it uses ProMotion 120 Hz displays, the Korean IME, trackpad gestures, and native menus directly — no abstraction layer in between. The goal isn't "surprisingly smooth for a terminal." It's a well-made Mac app that happens to be a terminal.
- Scrolling feels like a Mac. ProMotion 120 Hz, per-pixel scrolling, momentum and rubber-banding — the same feel as scrolling a web page in Safari.
- Korean input just works. Type as fast as you like; the first jamo never disappears and compositions never tangle. We tracked down the subtle timing races in the macOS Korean IME and fixed them, and in-progress compositions render right where they belong.
- The GPU draws everything. The Metal renderer handles truecolor, bold/underline/strikethrough/hyperlinks, double-width CJK, and color emoji (including ZWJ sequences and flags). Symbols your font lacks — like ④ — still show up through font fallback.
- The fundamentals of an all-day tool. Tabs and split panes (split, rearrange, switch), a settings UI, session restore that brings everything back when you relaunch, Sparkle auto-updates, and a
damson-clifor scripted control.
- Developers who keep a terminal open all day on macOS. If it's the window you stare at the longest, it should be the best-made window you own.
- Developers who work in Korean. Commit messages, chat, docs — you shouldn't have to brace yourself every time you type 한글 in a terminal.
- People running CLI AI coding agents. If you keep agents like Claude Code running across several panes, smooth rendering under fast output streams and rock-solid splits make a difference you can feel.
- People who won't give up the native Mac feel. If you expect system shortcuts, menus, and gestures to work exactly like every other Mac app.
Grab the latest .dmg from GitHub Releases and drop it into Applications. From then on the app keeps itself up to date (Sparkle).
- Requires macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple
Damson is in active beta. The developer uses it as their daily-driver terminal and polishes it through daily dogfooding.
Damson can open, label and observe panes running Anthropic's claude, and there's a Claude
Code skill that teaches Claude how to drive it. Ask for "a tab per task" and you get one
labelled tab per piece of work, grouped so the whole run folds or closes as a unit — and a
notification when one of them is blocked waiting on you.
claude plugin marketplace add hulryung/damson
claude plugin install damson-orchestration@damsonDamson is a terminal emulator, so its repository is large. If you'd rather not have all of it checked out for one skill, take just the plugin (about 250 KB):
claude plugin marketplace add hulryung/damson --sparse .claude-plugin pluginsThe skill drives two command-line tools that ship inside the app, at
Damson.app/Contents/Resources/. Link them onto your PATH — install-local.sh does this
for you, or by hand:
sudo ln -sf /Applications/Damson.app/Contents/Resources/damson-cli /usr/local/bin/
sudo ln -sf /Applications/Damson.app/Contents/Resources/damson-crew /usr/local/bin/damson-cli addresses panes one at a time; damson-crew runs a whole list of tasks and
waits for the one that needs you:
damson-crew run --tasks tasks.json --group refactor
damson-crew watch --tasks tasks.json --notify --focus
damson-crew close --group refactor --yestasks.json is just a list. Each name becomes the tab's label, so you can tell the run
apart at a glance. Give a task a repo instead of a cwd and a git worktree is made for it:
[
{"name": "review-api", "cwd": "~/dev/api", "prompt": "review the auth changes"},
{"name": "fix-parser", "repo": "~/dev/core", "branch": "agent/fix-parser",
"prompt": "fix the failing parser tests", "command": ["codex"]}
]Task names must be unique within a list. Different groups can reuse the same task names; retrying a task within its group reattaches to the existing tab.
It is not tied to Claude. Worktree support is per-tool and inconsistent — claude -w,
grok --worktree=<name>, nothing at all in codex or cursor-agent — so damson-crew makes
the worktree itself and starts the agent in it. The prompt is appended as the last argument,
which claude, codex, grok and cursor-agent all accept; a tool that wants it behind a
flag takes {prompt} in its command.
close --remove-worktrees tidies them up afterwards, and never forces: git refuses to
remove a worktree holding uncommitted or untracked files, and that refusal is reported rather
than worked around. Teardown cannot destroy an agent's unsaved work.
Crew records ownership in git's worktree metadata. Reused user-created worktrees are
preserved; shared worktrees remain until the last owning group releases them. Cleanup also
checks for panes using the worktree in other running Damson instances. Worktrees created by
older versions without ownership records are preserved rather than adopted automatically.
Use --worktree-root DIR to override the location for a run.
When cleanup cannot complete, close reports the reason and exits nonzero. Once the cause
is resolved, repeat close --remove-worktrees --tasks FILE --group NAME --yes; cleanup can
continue even if the group's tabs were already closed. Missing or
invalid task files are rejected before any tabs are closed.
Agents run with --dangerously-skip-permissions by default, so a task runs through instead
of stopping to ask — an agent waiting on an approval is the most common way a run stalls.
That does mean agents edit files and run commands without asking; Settings → Agents turns
it off, along with the default agent, the notification behaviour, and where worktrees go.
damson-cli --pane ID reveal-pane selects the exact pane and brings its owning window
and tab forward. watch --focus uses this command; update the app and bundled CLIs together.
One caveat worth knowing before you plan around it: the watching half is Claude-only.
watch --notify works by joining a pane to Claude Code's own session records, so agents from
other tools open, get labelled and grouped, and run — but never raise a "blocked on you"
alert, because nothing publishes that state.
For a request such as “build a game with several agents”, the orchestration skill can prepare a dependency graph, run implementations in parallel, then integrate and validate what they produced. Use the managed workflow mode:
damson-crew workflow run --plan workflow.json --state .crew/game-1
damson-crew workflow status --state .crew/game-1Tasks are finite commands running in real Damson panes. A task succeeds only after its command, validation commands, and required output checks pass. Dependent tasks wait for that result; failed prerequisites block their descendants. Plans control parallelism, shared-resource exclusion, timeouts, and bounded retries. Logs and results remain in the state directory after panes finish. Repeat the same command to resume a stopped coordinator without replaying completed work or duplicating live attempts.
The skill supplies the planning and final artifact review; the CLI executes the plan.
Prompt tasks default to Claude print mode and require validation commands. Other finite
agent commands can be supplied explicitly. Interactive run/watch remain available for
sessions you want to take over: their idle state never advances a workflow.
See the workflow schema and example. The example's syntax/unit checks should be followed by a real browser play check before calling a game finished. Update the app, bundled CLIs, and orchestration plugin together when adopting managed workflows.
Damson's engine ships as a Swift Package, DamsonTerminal — the same VT parser, grid, and Metal renderer the app uses, available as a library so you can put a terminal view inside your own macOS app. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for details.
If you're curious about the internals:
- docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — overall architecture and module layout
- docs/METAL-RENDERER-PLAN.md — design and build-out of the Metal renderer
- docs/SMOOTH-SCROLL.md — the concrete recipe for guaranteed-smooth scrolling
- docs/KOREAN-IME.md — root-cause analysis and fix for the Korean first-jamo race
- docs/KOREAN-FONT-CASCADE.md — Korean font fallback design
- docs/CLAUDE-ORCHESTRATION.md — running agents in panes, and where that stops