Lios

Lios is a gorgeous, fast, real Linux terminal by Knott Dynamics and Trevor Knott. It uses GTK4 and VTE for correct terminal behavior, then layers on the parts that make a terminal feel premium every day: live themes, glass backgrounds, session-only Bash prompt profiles, Sixel images, same-directory windows, and safe GPU controls.

Created and maintained by Trevor Knott through Knott Dynamics.

If you want a terminal that looks custom without becoming fragile, Lios is built for that. It does not fake terminal behavior, does not edit your shell startup files for prompt experiments, and does not hide risky renderer choices behind defaults. It gives you a reliable VTE core with a strong visual system and fast live controls.

Why Lios

• Real terminal behavior from VTE, not a toy parser.
• Premium visuals built in: curated themes, glass opacity, background images, accent tint, cursor profiles, and live preferences.
• Session-only Bash prompt profiles for newly opened terminals, without touching .bashrc or persisted config.
• Same-directory new windows for smooth shell workflows.
• Sixel rendering, when provided by the system VTE build, and terminal identity exports for modern CLI image workflows.
• Reliable Cairo rendering by default, with explicit opt-in GTK auto/OpenGL/Vulkan modes when you want GPU acceleration.
• Small, local, and boring where it matters: no telemetry, no background downloads, no secret storage.

Features

• GTK4 window with a VTE terminal widget.
• Spawns $SHELL, with common Unix shell fallbacks.
• Optional -- COMMAND ... and --command "..." launch modes.
• Dark readable defaults: white-on-black palette, opaque dark backing layer, Monospace 12, block cursor, 1,000 lines of scrollback.
• Built-in themes plus strict named custom themes authored in TOML and available everywhere themes can be selected. The Bronco preset combines Ember colors, the Lightbar Bash prompt, and a cyan accent.
• Slider-based master/full-window opacity plus nested image, terminal shade, and accent opacity controls.
• Background image support with ~ path expansion, fixed color tint, or per-launch random accent tint.
• Asynchronous, coalesced wallpaper decoding with guarded source work and bounded logical texture memory.
• Packaged default background image for first launch on new machines.
• Explicit visible mouse pointer over the terminal instead of VTE's dark text cursor shape.
• Renderer controls: reliable cairo by default, GTK-managed automatic selection with auto, or explicit OpenGL (gl) and Vulkan (vulkan) overrides.
• Child shells get TERM=xterm-256color, COLORTERM=truecolor, and TERM_PROGRAM=lios; Sixel rendering is enabled when the system VTE build supports it.
• Bash prompt profiles are session-local: shell-default leaves shell prompts untouched, while lightbar, timebar, fibonnaci, fano-plane, alice-bob, and akira initialize Lios-only prompt variables when a new Bash terminal starts without writing shell startup files.
• Desktop launcher install with lios --install or lios ---install.
• App icon installed from assets/logo.png.
• Optional window decoration/topbar removal.
• Slim topbar with a collapsible in-window preferences drawer for common live theme/background changes.
• Compact keyboard-first, literal case-sensitive scrollback search with wraparound and retained per-window queries.
• Ctrl+Shift+N and New Window open a borderless terminal in the active terminal directory.
• Persistent right-click appearance submenus for background images, terminal glass, accent presets, random tint, and themes; Menu or Shift+F10 opens the same keyboard-accessible menu.
• Right-click diagnostics for active windows, RSS, scrollback, terminal identity, image protocol, theme, background, and config path.
• Terminal-driven config commands for theming from a shell or script.
• Clipboard/context actions for inline link opening/address copy, copy, copy as HTML, paste, select all, and Find....
• Adaptive literal search stays live for ordinary buffers and switches to explicit Enter/Prev/Next scans for large scrollback, avoiding a synchronous scan on every edit.
• Atomic config saves follow existing symlinks and update their resolved target without severing the link.
• Shell-controlled titles are bounded, whitespace-normalized, and prefixed with the configured app title; BEL produces a quiet visual pulse instead of disappearing silently.
• Guarded terminal clipboard paste: ordinary single-line text pastes directly, while line breaks, disallowed control characters, and text over 4,096 UTF-8 bytes require native confirmation.
• Safe multi-file drag-and-drop inserts shell-quoted local paths (or remote URIs) at the cursor without executing them; oversized drops are rejected.
• Active-process close protection warns before a shortcut, menu action, or window control terminates a detectable external command, explicit launch, or background shell job.
• OSC 8 hyperlinks and detected http, https, and file text use VTE's safe pointer hit-testing. Hold Ctrl and click to open a link; Lios requires the press and release to stay on the same link. Use Ctrl+Shift when you want normal terminal selection over a link.
• Fixed cursor color profiles for XFCE Red, Violet, Cyan, Emerald, Amber, and Rose, plus persistent cursor-to-accent matching.
• Keyboard shortcuts for Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+V, Ctrl+Shift+A, Ctrl+Shift+F, Ctrl+Shift+N, Ctrl+Shift+Q, Ctrl+Shift+,, Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, and Ctrl+0. Menu or Shift+F10 opens the terminal context menu. In search, Enter finds next, Shift+Enter finds previous, and Esc closes the context menu, search, then preferences before reaching the terminal.

Links

• Source repository
• crates.io package
• docs.rs package page
• GTK4 project
• VTE terminal widget

Author and License

Lios is created by Trevor Knott through Knott Dynamics. It is distributed under your choice of the MIT License or Apache License 2.0. The packaged NOTICE preserves the project attribution alongside both canonical license texts.

Installation

The crates.io default has no GTK, GDK, VTE, GLib, or other native build dependencies. Install it normally:

cargo install lios
lios

The first lios run detects apt, DNF, Pacman, Zypper, apk, or XBPS; installs the matching distribution-managed GTK4/VTE development packages; replaces the bootstrap with the full native terminal from the exact same crates.io release; verifies the replacement before executing it, installs the desktop launcher, and starts Lios. lios install provisions without launching. The bootstrap's lios --check reports build dependencies and architecture; after native installation, the same command adds toolkit, display-session, and renderer diagnostics. Sudo or doas is requested only for system packages.

Lios native code deliberately stays on the GTK 4.0 API floor and supports later GTK 4.x releases through GTK's stable major-version ABI. It requires VTE GTK4 0.70+ for coordinate-safe link hit-testing. GTK3 is a different ABI and widget toolkit, not an older GTK4 runtime that one binary can select dynamically; a GTK3 build would require a separate frontend.

The bootstrap does not install private copies of GTK or VTE into /usr/local. Native terminal libraries are security-sensitive and must remain under the distribution's update system. A distribution without VTE GTK4 0.70+ needs a newer repository or a maintained portable Lios package. Upstream VTE releases before 0.76.3 are affected by CVE-2024-37535; lios --check warns below that upstream baseline, while allowing for distributions that backported the fix without changing the upstream version number. Keep the distribution's security updates applied. CARGO_BUILD_JOBS defaults to two to limit memory use on embedded systems and can be overridden.

No single native binary can cover every Linux CPU, both glibc and musl, every display stack, and immutable/package-managed systems. The supported source build is Linux on a Rust-supported Unix architecture with GTK 4.0+, VTE GTK4 0.70+, and either a working Wayland or X11 GDK backend. Run lios --check when diagnosing a machine; it does not require a working display merely to report toolkit versions, and it separately reports whether GTK can connect to the current display session.

The CI compatibility floor is compiled and tested in Debian 12's GTK 4.8/VTE 0.70 environment, while the primary job covers Ubuntu 24.04's newer stack. This catches accidental use of newer GTK/GDK/VTE symbols while keeping current-toolkit coverage. GDK is shipped as part of the selected GTK4 runtime; it is not a separately swappable UI API.

For development or systems already provisioned with GTK4 and VTE GTK4 headers, build the full terminal directly with --features native.

Run

Install from crates.io:

cargo install lios
lios

Run from source:

cargo run --features native
cargo run --features native -- --working-directory "$HOME"
cargo run --features native -- -- htop
cargo run --features native -- --command "ls -la"
cargo run --features native -- --theme solarized-dark
cargo run --features native -- --gpu
cargo run --features native -- --gpu-mode vulkan
cargo run --features native -- --renderer gl
cargo run --features native -- --opacity 0.88
cargo run --features native -- --background-image ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg --background-opacity 0.50 --random-overlay
cargo run --features native -- --hide-titlebar
cargo run --features native -- config init
cargo run --features native -- config set gpu on
cargo run --features native -- config set gpu_mode gl
cargo run --features native -- config set theme solarized-dark
cargo run --features native -- config set renderer gl
cargo run --features native -- config set background.image ~/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg
cargo run --features native -- config set topbar false

Clipboard Safety

Context-menu Paste and Ctrl+Shift+V use guarded terminal paste. Shift+Insert uses the same guard only while the terminal owns focus, so paste in search and preference text fields stays local to those fields. Middle-click primary-selection paste remains VTE behavior and is intentionally not intercepted.

Empty clipboard text is a no-op, and normal single-line text (including tabs) pastes immediately. Clipboard text requires confirmation when it contains LF, CR, or CRLF line breaks, disallowed C0/C1 controls, or more than 4,096 UTF-8 bytes. The confirmation shows only reason and count metadata, never the clipboard contents. Assessment of large text runs off the UI thread and is cancelled when it becomes stale; a single text paste above 64 MiB is rejected with a clear warning to bound memory and latency.

Optional Plugins

Core Lios stays small. Optional helpers use separate lios-* packages.

LiosBar is the native sidebar workspace for people who want several live terminal sessions inside one window. Its sidebar is on the left by default, can be moved to the right, and acts as navigation between retained VTE sessions. LiosBar is developed in its own repository and published as lios-bar; it is not bundled into the core terminal.

Lios Preferences now includes a Plugins card. Installation discovery and Cargo metadata verification run without blocking the GTK UI. Its curated catalog can install the exact reviewed LiosBar release, enable or disable its Lios integration, repair an unverified or stale install, and launch it. Installation occurs only after an explicit click or enable action. Disabling preserves the binary and never terminates an already-running plugin process; it only stops Lios from presenting that plugin as active.

cargo install lios-bar
lios-bar

The standalone LiosSSH plugin launches OpenSSH inside Lios without storing hosts, passwords, keys, or SSH config. Its source and package files are not bundled with core Lios:

cargo install lios-ssh
lios-ssh user@example.com
lios-ssh -p 2222 user@example.com
lios-ssh --theme solarized-dark -- -J jump.example.com user@example.com

The helper wraps lios -- ssh ... using argv. OpenSSH still handles ~/.ssh/config, SSH agent, known hosts, keys, jump hosts, and verification.

See PLUGINS.md for the trust model, install metadata checks, and the contract future official plugins must meet.

Configuration

Lios reads ~/.config/lios/config.toml by default when it exists. Use --config path/to/config.toml to load another file.

[window]
title = "Lios"
width = 960
height = 640
decorated = false # set true to show the topbar/window decorations
renderer = "cairo" # auto lets GTK choose; gl/vulkan force a backend; cairo is software
opacity = 1.00 # master/full-window opacity

[terminal]
font = "Monospace 12"
scrollback_lines = 1000 # max 100000

[[custom_theme]]
name = "midnight-copper"
base = "default"
foreground = "#f4e7d3"
background = "#100c0a"
cursor_background = "#d97745"
cursor_foreground = "#100c0a"
palette = ["#100c0a", "#c65f46", "#7f9f5f", "#d4a656", "#6688aa", "#a8759b", "#5f9f9a", "#d8c8b8", "#5b504a", "#e07a5f", "#9fbd78", "#f2cc72", "#82a7c9", "#c394b7", "#7fc2ba", "#fff4e6"]

[theme]
name = "midnight-copper"
# Optional custom overrides:
# foreground = "#ffffff"
# background = "#000000"
# Optional XFCE Red cursor preset values:
# cursor_background = "#e6192e"
# cursor_foreground = "#a51d2d"
# cursor = "#e6192e" # legacy alias for cursor_background
# cursor_match_overlay = false # cursor follows an existing effective accent
# unified_accent = false # enables a visible accent and matches the cursor
# palette = ["#000000", "#aa0000", "#00aa00", "#aa5500", "#0000aa", "#aa00aa", "#00aaaa", "#aaaaaa", "#555555", "#ff5555", "#55ff55", "#ffff55", "#5555ff", "#ff55ff", "#55ffff", "#ffffff"]

[[theme_profile]]
name = "Copper Glass"
theme = "midnight-copper"
font = "Monospace 12"
window_opacity = 0.95
terminal_opacity = 0.50
overlay_color = "#d97745"
overlay_opacity = 0.12
random_overlay = false

[background]
image = "/home/example/Pictures/wallpaper.jpg"
image_opacity = 1.00
terminal_opacity = 0.50
# Use lower values for more glass/desktop transparency.
# overlay_color = "#7c3aed"
overlay_opacity = 0.00
random_overlay = true

[plugins]
lios_bar = false # Preferences manages this without uninstalling the binary

CLI flags override the config file for one run. Use --gpu to let GTK select an accelerated renderer for the active GTK/GDK/driver combination, --gpu-mode gl to force OpenGL, --gpu-mode vulkan to explicitly try Vulkan, and --no-gpu to force the Cairo renderer. Explicit renderer overrides use GTK's GSK_RENDERER diagnostic interface and therefore apply on the next launch; auto leaves it unset. The text config stores this as window.renderer so older configs remain valid.

Custom Themes

Each [[custom_theme]] defines one reusable terminal color theme. Its name must be a unique lowercase slug such as midnight-copper; names cannot collide with a built-in name or alias, including legacy aliases such as xfce, xterm, and dracula. base defaults to default and must resolve directly to a built-in theme. Custom themes cannot inherit from other custom themes.

The optional foreground, background, cursor_background, cursor_foreground, and palette fields override the built-in base. Colors must be valid GTK color strings and palette, when present, must contain exactly 16 valid colors. An omitted cursor field inherits the base cursor; an empty cursor string explicitly clears it. Unknown fields, duplicate names, invalid slugs, unknown bases, invalid colors, and incorrectly sized palettes make configuration loading fail without replacing the existing config during a save.

Select a custom theme with [theme].name, lios --theme midnight-copper, or lios config set theme midnight-copper. Config-file custom themes are also listed once after the public built-ins in Preferences and the right-click Theme menu. Theme matching is case-insensitive, while the stored effective name is canonical. Selecting a named theme deliberately removes active [theme] foreground/background/palette/cursor overrides; saving unrelated preferences preserves those overrides, custom-theme tables and comments, and unrelated TOML sections.

Use lios config themes to inspect the active theme and every selectable built-in or configured name without launching GTK or installing assets. lios config validate preflights the complete default config without changing it, including strict known-section fields, custom themes, and appearance profiles; legacy terminal.prompt_profile remains accepted and preserved but ignored because prompts are runtime-only. lios config theme-template quiet-night --base solarized-dark prints a valid inheriting [[custom_theme]] block whose optional color fields can be uncommented before adding it to the config.

Appearance profiles and custom themes are different. A custom theme is an authored reusable color scheme; a [[theme_profile]] is a saved complete appearance containing a theme reference plus font, opacity, background, accent, cursor, and window choices. Profile names are unique case-insensitively so updates and authored comments always belong to one unambiguous table. Profiles may reference custom theme names and can be saved or applied from Preferences. Duplicate names and invalid profile theme references fail clearly during config loading.

Theme cursor colors can be configured as a pair with theme.cursor_background and theme.cursor_foreground; leaving both unset keeps the theme's inherited cursor. Existing theme.cursor_match_overlay configurations retain their cursor-only behavior, while theme.unified_accent = true enables the coordinated overlay and cursor mode for the current terminal and newly opened windows. The red XFCE-style pair shown above is available as a fixed XFCE Red profile, alongside Violet, Cyan, Emerald, Amber, and Rose cursor profiles. Existing configs that use theme.cursor still work as a cursor-background alias. Preferences include cursor and accent color pickers, fixed presets, an Inherit control that removes active cursor overrides, and compact saved appearance profiles backed by [[theme_profile]] tables. An explicitly empty cursor string in TOML remains available when a theme's own cursor should be disabled rather than inherited.

Unified Accent is the master visual-match toggle. It keeps the cursor on the effective overlay color and guarantees that an accent is visible: an existing fixed accent is preserved, otherwise random accent mode is enabled, and zero accent opacity is raised to the normal default. Selecting a fixed cursor profile, clearing cursor colors, clearing the accent, or reducing accent opacity to zero turns Unified Accent off.

Bash prompt profiles are runtime-only UI choices for newly opened terminals. shell-default leaves the next shell's prompt untouched; lightbar, timebar, fibonnaci, fano-plane, alice-bob, and akira are applied by a private startup rcfile before the new Bash accepts input. Lios deliberately never types setup commands into a live PTY, where those bytes could reach ssh, an editor, or a partially entered shell command. It does not edit .bashrc or persist prompt choices to the config file.

Use window.opacity or --opacity as the main full-window opacity. This affects the whole terminal UI and is the primary control for app transparency.

Background images are rendered against the theme background and composited below a transparent VTE terminal. Image probing and scaled decoding run asynchronously through a serialized, duplicate-coalescing queue, so changing a wallpaper does not synchronously decode it on GTK's UI thread. image_opacity controls how strongly the image blends into the theme-colored base. terminal_opacity is the nested terminal shade layer over that image; lower values show more image while preserving readable text. Without an image, use the master opacity for reliable transparent-terminal behavior, then use terminal_opacity only as the inner shade. If an older config has an image with terminal_opacity = 1.00, Lios uses the image shade at runtime so the image is not hidden by a fully opaque terminal background.

On a new machine with no existing Lios config, the packaged default background is written to the user data directory and used automatically. Existing config files are respected.

The topbar is hidden by default. Ctrl+Shift+F opens the compact search bar and selects its retained query. Search is literal, case-sensitive, wraparound, and limited to 1,024 characters. Live results are debounced while the actual terminal buffer is at most 10,000 rows. Larger or unmeasurable buffers show Press Enter to search and perform no scan while you type; use Enter / Next to search or move forward and Shift+Enter / Prev to search or move backward. If a live scan proves slow, the rest of that search session also switches to explicit scans. Esc closes search. Ctrl+Shift+, opens the compact in-window preferences drawer, and the right-click menu includes both Find... and Open Preferences.... Search and preferences close one another; hiding preferences preserves unsaved controls. Ctrl+Shift+N opens another borderless terminal window in the active terminal directory using the current live settings. Ctrl+Shift+Q closes the current window. The Preferences header shows the active config destination with Open Folder and Copy Path actions, or clearly identifies session-only mode and disables both actions. An amber UNSAVED badge remains visible beside the title while pending changes exist, including when the footer is below the fold. The top quick bar holds Unified Accent and an immediate Dark Default recovery action, while the footer groups the glowing Live Edit toggle with Revert and Apply and Save. The drawer pairs related display/cursor and background/opacity cards, and can change GPU acceleration mode, built-in or custom theme, the next terminal's Bash prompt profile, cursor colors, font, topbar visibility, background image path, layered opacity, accent color, and random overlay. Accent and cursor colors have clickable swatches. The Profiles card accepts a name and saves with Enter or Add / Update, then shows paired apply/remove controls for each saved look. Removing a profile updates saved profile metadata without changing the active appearance or pending controls. Background Browse and Clear actions apply immediately and explain that behavior in their tooltips. Other edits enable Apply and Save plus Revert; Ctrl+S or Ctrl+Enter applies pending changes, Ctrl+R reverts them, and Esc closes the drawer. These shortcuts are active only inside Preferences. Live Edit starts off whenever the drawer opens, coalesces valid edits for 800 ms before applying and saving while lit, and turns itself off when the drawer closes. Prompt profile choices affect newly opened terminals only; renderer changes are saved and apply on the next launch. Changes are written back to ~/.config/lios/config.toml when a config path is available.

Right-click inside the terminal for quick actions, or use Menu/Shift+F10. Right-clicking a supported inline link enables Open Link and Copy Link Address; link actions never invoke a shell. The menu defaults to Keep Open Between Actions, so repeated appearance tuning returns to the same anchor instead of disappearing. Toggle that option off, choose Close Menu, or press Esc to dismiss it; one-shot terminal/navigation actions close it automatically. New Window opens a borderless terminal in the active terminal directory. Copy Working Directory places the live shell directory on the clipboard, while Open Working Directory launches it in the desktop file manager. Both fall back to the launch or process directory when VTE has not reported one. Close Window manages terminal windows. Diagnostics prints resource state into the terminal. Reset to Dark Default returns the current window to the plain dark default look. The Opacity submenu starts with master/full-window opacity controls, then nests terminal shade controls under Terminal Shade. The Background submenu changes/clears images, adjusts image brightness, or resets the whole background. Cursor applies fixed cursor profiles (XFCE Red, Violet, Cyan, Emerald, Amber, Rose), enables Unified Accent, or restores the inherited default. Bash Prompt for New Terminal selects the startup profile for the next window. Accent switches fixed accent presets (Violet, Cyan, Emerald, Amber, Rose), toggles random accent tint, and adjusts accent strength. The Theme submenu switches public built-ins and configured custom themes. Appearance actions apply live and persist to the active config path when one is available.

Dropping files or folders from a GTK file manager inserts their shell-quoted paths at the cursor, separated by spaces. Remote items use their URI when no local path exists. Lios never appends Enter, and rejects control-bearing or non-UTF-8 local names instead of allowing terminal input controls to escape the quoted path. Empty drops, malformed URI lists, more than 256 items, and generated text over 1 MiB are also rejected.

Closing an idle shell remains immediate. When the terminal owns a detectable foreground or background process, has replaced the shell with exec, or was launched with an explicit command, every close path presents one confirmation dialog instead. Process-inspection failures fail closed, repeated close requests cannot stack dialogs, Cancel leaves the process untouched, and a natural child exit dismisses any stale confirmation and closes normally.

Desktop Launcher

Install or build the binary first, then run lios --install to add Lios to the desktop app menu without launching it from another terminal. lios ---install is also accepted.

cargo install --path . --features native
lios --install

The command writes dev.lios.Terminal.desktop under $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications or ~/.local/share/applications with Terminal=false and Exec pointing at the exact binary that ran the command. It also installs the app icon from assets/logo.png as dev.lios.Terminal under the user icon theme and requests a desktop/icon cache refresh when the standard desktop tools are available. Normal GUI startup also makes the packaged icon available to GTK so direct native-feature Cargo launches can resolve the same icon name. Use lios --uninstall or lios ---uninstall to remove that launcher and icon.

Resource Policy

• Terminal scrollback is bounded. scrollback_lines must be between 0 and 100000; the default is 1000.
• Runtime diagnostics show active windows, process RSS, scrollback limit, renderer, terminal identity, image protocol, theme, background image, opacity, overlay state, and config path.
• Wallpaper files are limited to 256 MiB encoded and sane source dimensions. Decoding preserves images already within budget and proportionally scales supported larger sources to at most 8,294,400 pixels, a 4,096-pixel edge, and roughly 32 MiB of logical RGBA texture data. Static non-interlaced PNGs use a row-streaming scaler with a separate 512 MiB source-work ceiling; animated PNGs are unsupported, and an interlaced PNG that would require downscaling is rejected. Oversized JPEGs have an additional 40-megapixel source ceiling; other oversized generic formats fail without falling back to a full decode. Loads are serialized, duplicate requests share one result, replaced views ignore stale completions, and the LRU retains at most four textures and 128 MiB of logical decoded texture data. Decoder work buffers, graphics-driver copies, and allocator retention can temporarily make process RSS higher than these logical texture limits.
• GTK callbacks that can outlive their parent window use weak window references to avoid reference cycles during repeated open/close cycles.
• Segmented preference controls store weak button references internally, avoiding self-cycles between buttons and their click closures.
• No Tokio tasks or channels are used; child processes are owned by VTE and tied to the terminal widget/window lifecycle.
• VTE Sixel rendering is enabled when the installed VTE build supports it. Diagnostics report the effective VTE Sixel setting, but Lios does not export a false image-protocol claim to child processes. Image tools still need to run outside tmux or inside tmux configured to pass image protocols through.
• Internal bridge launchers can set LIOS_BRIDGE_CONTAINED=1 to keep terminal children in the bridge cgroup. This marker coordinates launch behavior; it is not a security token or trust boundary.

Rust 1.88.0 can ICE while compiling generated GTK binding crates with heavy debug or optimization settings. Cargo.toml keeps the workaround scoped to the affected GTK crates. If cargo install still crashes while compiling GTK dependencies with a rustc stack trace, retry with a larger compiler stack:

RUST_MIN_STACK=16777216 cargo install --path . --features native

Terminal config commands:

lios config path
lios config sample
lios config init
lios config init --force
lios config show
lios config themes
lios config validate
lios config theme-template quiet-night --base solarized-dark
lios config set gpu on
lios config set gpu_mode vulkan
lios config set renderer gl
lios config set theme solarized-dark
lios config set opacity 0.88
lios config set background_opacity 0.80
lios config set overlay_color '#7c3aed'
lios config set overlay_opacity 0.18
lios config set random_overlay true
lios config set cursor_match_overlay true
lios config set unified_accent true
lios config set topbar false
lios --install
lios ---install
lios --uninstall

Useful keys include gpu, gpu_mode, renderer, theme, font, cursor_match_overlay, unified_accent, opacity, background.image, background_opacity, background_image_opacity, overlay_color, overlay_opacity, random_overlay, and topbar.

Package

The Cargo package is named lios and includes crate metadata for packaging. Cargo.toml uses an explicit package include list, so workspace notes such as .notes.MD are not part of the published crate. From a repository checkout, run:

sh audit-package.sh
cargo publish --dry-run --locked --features native
cargo publish --locked

The archive audit requires a clean Git commit for a release, compares every packaged path against an exact allowlist, rejects symlinks and unexpected size growth, and scans the generated archive for high-confidence credential patterns.

For socials

Across Lios 0.1.71–0.1.74, we shipped safer, faster terminal UX: OSC 8 links, GPU-cached wallpapers, atomic config/plugin saves, responsive large-scrollback search, bounded async image decoding, safe drag/drop, close guards, hardened titles/bells, and cross-version GTK/VTE CI.

Lios 0.1.74 is out: GTK/VTE compatibility diagnostics, distribution-managed native libraries, bounded clipboard/drop streaming, cancellable terminal startup, private versioned plugin roots, renderer auto-selection, and an exact audited Cargo release archive.