Introduction

DiceTerm is a terminal for Windows built around one idea: get out of your way. You get a real shell, a clean grid of panes, and every workspace exactly where you left it — without noise, without telemetry, without anything you didn't ask for.

What DiceTerm is

DiceTerm is a Windows-only desktop terminal emulator. It runs real shells — PowerShell, Command Prompt, PowerShell 7, Git Bash, WSL — using ConPTY, the same native Windows pseudoterminal layer that Windows Terminal uses. There is no translation layer and no character-at-a-time SSH tunnel for local shells; everything runs at native speed.

The closest reference point is iTerm2 on macOS: a terminal that earns trust by being reliable, then stays out of the way while you work. The feature set leans toward that tradition — instant replay, marks, broadcast input, a composer, copy mode — but adapted for Windows.

Philosophy

Calm by default. DiceTerm makes no network connections of its own. No telemetry, no analytics, no update pings (beyond a passive GitHub releases feed check). The only traffic is the SSH connections you start. Saved servers store host, user, and port only — never passwords or keys.

Local-first. Your session lives in %APPDATA%\DiceTerm\ as plain JSON files on your own machine. Nothing is synced to a cloud service.

Deeply customizable, but sane out of the box. Themes, fonts, scrollback size, keyboard shortcuts, shell per tab, opacity, sidebar position — all of it is yours to tune. The defaults are chosen to be useful without configuration.

What you get

Real shells

Every tab and pane is a genuine shell process. You choose the shell per tab from a dropdown — PowerShell, CMD, WSL, Git Bash, or a custom path. A split inherits its parent's shell, or you can override it per pane.

Split-pane grids

Divide your workspace into any layout you need: split right (Ctrl+Shift+E), split down (Ctrl+Shift+O), or jump straight to a 2×2 grid (Ctrl+Shift+G). Resize by dragging dividers. There is no hard pane limit.

Workspaces

Each workspace in the left rail is an independent layout with its own set of panes, accent color, and active shell state. Switching workspaces never kills a running process — inactive workspaces keep running in the background.

Perfect session restore

Close DiceTerm, reopen it, and everything comes back: pane layout, scrollback buffers, working directories, pane names and colors, window size and position. SSH panes reconnect automatically and seed the old scrollback so you can read back what happened.

SSH and tmux

Save a server (host, user, port) and connect with one click. Auth is handled entirely by the system OpenSSH client — ~/.ssh/config, keys, or a password prompt — so DiceTerm never touches credentials. The tmux integration (beta) runs control-mode tmux over SSH and renders remote panes as native local xterm panes.

Keyboard-first power features

Find in scrollback (Ctrl+F), broadcast input to all panes in a workspace (Ctrl+Shift+I), instant replay up to 5 minutes back (Ctrl+Shift+B), drop marks at prompt boundaries (Ctrl+Shift+M), a multi-line composer (Ctrl+Shift+L), a paste-history picker (Ctrl+Shift+H), and a command palette to fuzzy-jump anywhere (Ctrl+Shift+P). All default shortcuts are remappable in Settings → Keyboard.

Where to next

• Install — download, SmartScreen, and requirements.
• Quickstart — open a shell, split a grid, and see session restore in five minutes.