Limitations - Terminal Click

Limitations

Abner Coimbre
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Let’s talk about 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 offers 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, occasional system updates (e.g. apt update), messing with environment variables, using the calculator or exploring the filesystem. You will discover TC has novel features to make the experience far more convenient.

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 (hint: it’s not just .bashrc!) because they depend on that behavior. Docker compose files do not scare them at all. So on and so forth.

So 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 some reasons why:

  • Limited Unicode: Apart from English and European languages, our UTF-8 support 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 ‘clickity clackity’ features are local to the machine where TC is installed. If we ssh into a remote host, we currently revert into a kind of “legacy mode” where it feels like an old-school terminal again.
  • No Shell: TC does not permanently connect to a shell. There’s a huge debate on that decision.

And of course we have sometimes have glitches or bugs. Power users may still join Early Access, with the understanding it’s a show of support to help me succeed as an indie dev <3.

-Abner