Ptyxis

Ptyxis is a GTK 4 and libadwaita terminal for the GNOME desktop, written in C by Christian Hergert and built on the VTE terminal widget. It was formerly named Prompt, and its stable Flathub build still uses the ID app.devsuite.Ptyxis. Its focus is local containers: Podman, Toolbox, Distrobox and JHBuild environments are discovered automatically and can be opened as tabs next to the host shell. The README notes it is the default terminal in Fedora Workstation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu. It suits GNOME users who work inside containers and want that handled by the terminal itself.

Settings are stored in GSettings under the org.gnome.Ptyxis schema and edited through the preferences window, with some options such as background opacity only reachable through gsettings. Named profiles set the default container, a custom startup command, the palette, scrollback and compatibility options like backspace and delete bindings. Custom .palette files go in ~/.local/share/org.gnome.Ptyxis/palettes/ (or the Flatpak data directory) and can be installed with ptyxis --import-palette. Keyboard shortcuts are remappable in the preferences.

PTY creation and container interaction run in a separate helper, ptyxis-agent, which runs on the host even when the UI is a Flatpak, so containers and host processes stay reachable from the sandbox. The UI shows indicators for sudo and SSH sessions, offers a searchable tab overview with live previews, can pin tabs and restore them with their profile, container and directory, and includes a terminal inspector for debugging escape sequences such as OSC hyperlinks. Container detection depends on the container tools emitting VTE escape sequences such as OSC 777, so older tool versions may not be recognized.

Rendering comes from VTE, which draws through GTK 4 and uses the GPU via GTK's renderer rather than a dedicated GPU text engine. Ptyxis has tabs but no split panes. VTE does not render programming-font ligatures, and Ptyxis does not turn on VTE's experimental Sixel support, so there is no inline image protocol. Docker has no dedicated integration beyond running the docker CLI. It is Linux-only, and the issue tracker is reserved for defects, with feature proposals expected to go through GNOME's design process first.