Kaku

Kaku

🎃 A fast, out-of-the-box terminal built for AI coding.

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Kaku is a fast and out-of-the-box terminal designed for AI coding. It is a deeply customized fork of WezTerm, offering polished defaults, built-in shell suite, Lua scripting, safe update flow, and a suite of CLI tools for immediate productivity. Kaku is fast, lightweight, and fully configurable via Lua scripts, providing a ready-to-work environment for coding enthusiasts.

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Kaku

A fast, out-of-the-box terminal built for AI coding.

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Kaku is a deeply customized fork of WezTerm, designed for an out-of-the-box experience.

Features

  • Zero Config: Polished defaults with JetBrains Mono, opencode theme, optimized macOS font rendering, smooth animations.
  • Built-in Shell Suite: Comes pre-loaded with Starship, z, Delta, syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, and autocompletions.
  • Fast & Lightweight: 40% smaller binary, instant startup, lazy loading, stripped-down GPU-accelerated core.
  • Lua Scripting: Retains the full power of WezTerm's Lua engine for infinite customization.
  • Safe Update Flow: Built-in updater (kaku update) plus Homebrew-aware upgrade path.

Quick Start

  1. Download Kaku DMG & Drag to Applications
  2. Or install with Homebrew: brew tap tw93/tap && brew install --cask tw93/tap/kaku
  3. Open Kaku. If macOS blocks the app, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → click "Open Anyway"
  4. On first launch, Kaku will automatically set up your shell environment

Usage Guide

Kaku comes with intuitive macOS-native shortcuts:

Action Shortcut
New Tab Cmd + T
New Window Cmd + N
Split Pane Vertical Cmd + D
Split Pane Horizontal Cmd + Shift + D
Zoom/Unzoom Pane Cmd + Shift + Enter
Resize Pane Cmd + Ctrl + Arrows
Close Tab/Pane Cmd + W
Navigate Tabs Cmd + [, Cmd + ] or Cmd + 1-9
Navigate Panes Cmd + Opt + Arrows
Clear Screen Cmd + R
Font Size Cmd + +, Cmd + -, Cmd + 0
Smart Jump z <dir>
Smart Select z -l <dir>
Recent Dirs z -t

Configuration

Kaku comes with a carefully curated suite of CLI tools, pre-configured for immediate productivity:

  • Starship: A fast, customizable prompt showing git status, package versions, and execution time.
  • z: A smarter cd command that learns your most used directories for instant navigation.
  • Delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output.
  • zsh-completions: Extended command and subcommand completion definitions.
  • Syntax Highlighting: Real-time command validation and coloring.
  • Autosuggestions: Intelligent, history-based completions similar to Fish shell.

Customization

Kaku is fully configurable via standard Lua scripts and is 100% compatible with WezTerm configuration.

On macOS, bundled defaults in Kaku.app/Contents/Resources/kaku.lua are fallback only, so user config is loaded first.

Use a single user config path: ~/.config/kaku/kaku.lua.

Updates & Reset

  • Check/apply update from CLI: kaku update
  • Remove Kaku-managed shell defaults and integration: kaku reset (or non-interactive kaku reset --yes)
  • GUI auto-update check uses numeric version comparison (for example 0.1.10 is correctly newer than 0.1.9).

Why Kaku?

I heavily rely on the CLI for both work and personal projects. Tools I've built, like Mole and Pake, reflect this.

I used Alacritty for years, but its lack of multi-tab support became cumbersome for AI-assisted coding. Kitty has some aesthetic and positioning quirks I couldn't get past. Ghostty shows promise but font rendering needs work. Warp feels bloated and requires a login. iTerm2 is reliable but showing its age and harder to deeply customize.

WezTerm is robust and hackable, and I am grateful for its powerful engine. However, I wanted an environment that was ready immediately, without extensive configuration—and something significantly faster and lighter.

So I built Kaku to be that environment: fast, polished, and ready to work.

Performance

Metric Upstream Kaku Methodology
Executable Size ~67 MB ~40 MB Aggressive symbol stripping & feature pruning
Resources Volume ~100 MB ~80 MB Asset optimization & lazy-loaded assets
Launch Latency Standard Instant Just-in-time initialization
Shell Bootstrap ~200ms ~100ms Optimized environment provisioning

Achieved through aggressive stripping of unused features, lazy loading of color schemes, and shell optimizations.

Support

  • If Kaku helped you, star the repo or share it with friends.
  • Got ideas or found bugs? Open an issue/PR or check CONTRIBUTING.md for details.
  • Like Kaku? Buy Tw93 a Coke to support the project!

License

MIT License, feel free to enjoy and participate in open source.

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