Contour, a modern cross-platform terminal emulator written in C++ built around Qt 6 and using GPU-accelerated rendering for smooth output and high-DPI displays, has just released version 0.8 with many new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.
The biggest addition is interactive command blocks, which make it easier to navigate and manage previous commands and their output. Contour can now track individual commands, displaying their exit status, execution time, duration, and working directory. Failed commands receive red indicators, while running commands are marked in yellow.
Users can also collapse a command’s output to a single line, useful when working with lengthy logs or commands producing hundreds of lines of text. A new gutter also provides fold controls, optional line numbers, and timestamps. Plus, a sticky command header keeps the relevant command visible as you scroll through its output.
Command navigation has also improved. Users can jump between prompts using Ctrl+Shift+Up and Ctrl+Shift+Down, copy previous commands or their output, and receive desktop notifications when long-running commands finish in an unfocused pane. Notifications trigger by default for commands running at least 10 seconds.
Another welcome addition is automatic detection of URLs and file paths in terminal output. These can now be opened using Ctrl+click, including file paths containing line and column numbers. The search experience has also been redesigned, replacing the previous text-based prompt with a graphical find bar featuring live match counts, navigation buttons, and case-sensitivity controls.
Regarding performance, according to developers’ benchmarks, plain-text processing increased from 166.6 MiB/s to 310.9 MiB/s, while colored-text throughput jumped from 42.7 MiB/s to 281.9 MiB/s. Full-screen terminal applications saw an even larger improvement, rising from 55.6 MiB/s to 593.2 MiB/s.
The release also improves graphical content handling by adding animation-frame support to the Kitty graphics protocol. Parsing performance for image-heavy workloads has been significantly optimized, reducing processing time in one benchmark from 7.55 seconds to 1.06 seconds.
On the shell integration side, Contour 0.8 expands support for Bash, Zsh, Fish, Nushell, and PowerShell. It also introduces support for systemd’s OSC 3008 context tracking, allowing systems running systemd 258 or later to provide command boundaries, exit statuses, and working directories without additional shell configuration.
Other improvements include the ability to select the GPU used for rendering on Linux and Windows, better Unicode and font handling, configurable tab colors, and an option to remember window positions between launches.
Finally, the update addresses numerous issues involving terminal resizing, scrollback history, SSH connections, Flatpak notifications, persistent daemon sessions, and Windows keyboard input. Several fixes also target crashes, freezes, and excessive memory usage, improving overall reliability.
For more information, see the changelog.
