Electron terminal with blocks, widgets, AI and a wsh control CLI.
waveterm.dev ↗repo ↗docs ↗wsh reference ↗Wave AI ↗Custom widgets ↗Release notes ↗
Wave is a host for panes; scene could run inside a Wave terminal block, while Wave's CLI ergonomics are worth copying.
Complement it: it does a neighbouring job; interoperate.
Wave already gives a coding agent what claude-canvas only demoed: a real second screen with many panes, driven from the command line the agent already lives in. Any CLI agent inside Wave can open a web page, a markdown preview, an image or an editor beside itself, run a command in its own block, badge a block when it needs attention, and read terminal scrollback, all through `wsh`, which works over SSH too. Blocks are addressable objects with JSON metadata, the built-in AI can screenshot widgets and act with approvals, and durable SSH sessions survive restarts. For 'an agent should be able to show me things next to the terminal', Wave is a shipping, Apache-licensed, 22k-star answer.
| UI as data | 2 scene 5 | block metadata and widgets.json are JSON; widget internals are React code |
|---|---|---|
| Agent can drive it | 3 scene 5 | wsh CLI covers open/run/close/setmeta of blocks for any in-terminal agent |
| Agent can see it | 3 scene 5 | scrollback text and block JSON; screenshots only for built-in AI |
| Small, targeted edits | 3 scene 5 | id-addressed block metadata edits, not UI internals |
| Time travel | 0 scene 0 | |
| Live data rate | 2 scene 5 | sysinfo graphs and terminals stream; no published rates |
| Terminal native | 2 scene 5 | it is a terminal emulator, but its rich widgets are Electron/web, not terminal cells |
| Pixel graphics | 4 scene 4 | |
| Teaching | 1 scene 3 | |
| Maturity | 4 scene 1 | 22k stars, years of releases; pre-1.0 versioning |
| Openness | 4 scene 4 |
Wave Terminal scene now scene planned
An agent running in a Wave terminal shells out to `wsh` (open a web/preview/editor block, run a command in a new block, set block metadata, read scrollback, list blocks as JSON, badge/notify). Wave's own AI uses internal tools. No MCP server for Wave itself was found.
Zero for CLI agents running inside Wave (wsh is on PATH); nothing for agents outside Wave.
Text scrollback via `wsh termscrollback`, block lists/metadata as JSON; widget screenshots only available to Wave AI internally.
Block-level: setmeta by block id, deleteblock, open/replace views. No patching of UI inside a widget.
None for UI/layout; durable SSH sessions preserve shell state.
Agent-drivable at the workspace layout level through a CLI: an agent can open panes and point them at things, but cannot build or patch a custom UI inside them (until Tsunami ships).
An Electron app whose window is a tiled layout of 'blocks': terminals, web views, editors, file previews, sysinfo graphs, Wave AI chat and custom widgets defined in widgets.json. A Go backend (wavesrv) holds the object model (workspaces, tabs, blocks with metadata) and exposes RPC; the `wsh` CLI, available inside every Wave terminal including over SSH, talks to it to open views, edit files, set/get block metadata, read terminal scrollback, run commands in new blocks, set badges and list blocks as JSON. Wave AI has internal tools to read terminal output, screenshot widgets, read/write files with approval and navigate web widgets. A Go reactive widget framework, Tsunami (vdom-based, with an AI 'builder'), has been in progress since 2025 ('WaveApps builder framework, not yet released' per release notes).
No published numbers.
Popular open-source desktop terminal (22.5k stars); distributed via its site, Snapcraft and package managers; no public download counts found.
Steady development by a small company; release cadence has slowed in 2026.
Releases: Roughly monthly through 2025 to v0.14.5 (2026-04-16); no stable release in the ~6 months since · Contributors: ~49 (GitHub contributors API with anon, last page index) · Recent: 39 commits since 2026-07-11; last push 2026-10-09 · Bus factor: medium: small company team
Agent opens and arranges panes beside the terminal and reads terminal text back; block ids with JSON metadata.
If the need is only 'show a web page / file / image next to the agent', Wave's blocks already do it. Scene's value is the custom live UI inside a pane, which Wave lacks today.
Wave cannot render an agent-authored, data-bound, keyboard-driven UI in a pane, read it back as structure, patch it by node id, or rewind it; scene can, and runs in any terminal rather than requiring one desktop app.
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