Limitations - Terminal Click Guide

Limitations

Abner Coimbre
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This is a mini essay to describe the state of Terminal Click (TC) as of 2026. The reader can decide whether to subscribe to Early Access or wait a while longer.

If the reader is a casual user of terminals, TC may already offer enough value to make the paid beta worth it. We define a casual user as anyone doing one-off tasks like running a build script, performing the occasional system update (e.g. apt update), looking at their environment variables, using a programmer’s calculator or just exploring the filesystem. Casual users will quickly discover TC has convenient and novel features to significantly improve their experience.

Power users, on the other hand, are the ones spending the majority of their working day inside a terminal. They will use editors like Neovim, Helix or GNU Emacs. They will have an ssh tab running multiple tmux sessions. They know exactly how a shell sources its environment (it’s not just .bashrc!) because they depend on that behavior. Docker compose files do not scare them at all, although they reserve right to hate containers. So on and so forth.

There’s a sliding scale when it comes to power users. The more they max out their power by approaching 100%, the less helpful Terminal Click will become, at least for now. Here’s the reasons why:

  • Limited Unicode: Apart from English and a few European languages, our UTF-8 rendering is lacking. This is our highest priority to address for the next major release.
  • Unoptimized Builds: The project is written in ‘dumb’ vanilla C. The only sophistication is our memory allocation strategy. Everything else remains currently unoptimized. TC runs mostly fine, but anything with high-throughput can lag. Performance benchmarks will likely fail at this time.
  • Local Features: Our cool ‘clickity clackity’ features are local to the machine where TC is installed. If we ssh into a remote host, we currently revert to a sort of legacy mode, and we regrettably deal with only dead text again.
  • No Shell: TC does not connect to shells (although we can execute one-off scripts.) There’s a huge debate on this decision.

And of course we have the occasional glitch or bug. Power users may still join Early Access, with the understanding it’s a show of support to help me succeed as an indie dev.

-Abner