Building this in the open — if it saves you time, a star helps others find it. Found a bug, or have an idea? Open an issue. New here? Start with a good first issue. Questions and ideas? Say hello in Discussions. New themes, widgets, and plugin ideas welcome.

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🌌 The Terminal OS

Orbit is designed to sit on a secondary monitor and never be closed. It is not just a system monitor; it is a complete developer workspace powered by a WebAssembly plugin ecosystem.

It uses zero web tech, runs on roughly 0.5% of a core at idle, and bypasses standard terminal cell boundaries by dynamically rendering block characters at a smooth 60 FPS.

🚀 Quick Start

Install Orbit via NPM (Recommended for prebuilt binaries) or Cargo.

# Instant zero-install launch via NPX
npx @ziuus/orbit

# Via Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S orbit-tui-bin
# or
paru -S orbit-tui-bin

# Via Cargo Binstall (Instant prebuilt binary)
cargo binstall orbit-tui

# Via Homebrew (macOS & Linux)
brew install ziuus/tap/orbit

# Via NPM (Global install)
npm install -g @ziuus/orbit

# Via Cargo (Compile from source)
cargo install orbit-tui

Note: If you are migrating from our previous iteration, simply rename your configuration folder: mv ~/.config/vanta ~/.config/orbit

🗂️ Core Workspaces

Key	Page	What's on it
1	Dashboard	System facts, distro logo, visualizer, top processes, interactive status, memory, network, calendar.
2	Monitor	Comprehensive system & process matrix. Filter, sort, and manage running tasks effortlessly.
3	Aesthetic	Ambient environments. Matrix rain, 3D starfield, spinning donut, pinned media, full-width visualizer.
4	Workspace	Built-in File Manager (with image previews), Agenda, Tasks, RSS feeds, and Obsidian vault viewer.
5	Orbit AI	Autonomous Agent Workstation. Supervise Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity, or Shell sessions 24/7 with zero key conflicts and instant fullscreen handover.
?	Help	Keybind reference overlay.

5 — Orbit AI (Autonomous Agent Cockpit)

Run and supervise background AI coding agents 24/7 without terminal context switches.

• Agent Fleet Telemetry: Live RAM & CPU metrics for all active agents.
• Embedded PTY Stream: 30 FPS non-blocking live terminal stream.
• Zero Key Conflicts: Dual-mode terminal focus passes all keystrokes (space, q, Tab, 1-5) directly to your agent. Press Esc anytime for Orbit Nav mode, or Alt+Enter for native fullscreen tmux handover.

2 — Monitor

A deep dive into your system's heartbeat. Every vital graph on top, every active process below. Sort it, filter it, tree it, kill it.

3 — Aesthetic

For when the build is running and you want a premium ambient display. Includes support for custom pinned images.

Includes 7 immersive ambient scenes:

• Audio Visualizer
• Matrix Rain
• Flip Clock
• Topographic Map
• True 3D Starfield (reacts to CPU spikes and music bass)
• Conway's Game of Life (auto-seeding)
• Terminal Snowfall (piles up and melts dynamically)

4 — Workspace

Turn your terminal into a productivity hub. Manage files (with image previews), read RSS news, track tasks, and view your Obsidian vault with markdown syntax highlighting. Press e on any focused panel to edit content in your $EDITOR.

⌨️ Keybinds

Key	Action
1 2 3 4 5	Switch workspace (persisted as startup page)
Tab / Shift-Tab	Cycle panel focus · Esc clears
Enter	Zoom the focused panel to the full page · Esc back
T	Next theme (persisted)
v	Visualizer style: bars / mirror / wave / peaks
+ / -	Sample faster / slower
Space n p	Play/pause · next · previous (MPRIS, any page)
< >	Volume down / up
?	Help overlay
q	Quit
~ / F12	Toggle Debug Logs overlay (s saves them to file)
S / ,	Open Settings overlay
Ctrl + ←/→	Resize dashboard columns horizontally
Ctrl + ↑/↓	Resize dashboard components vertically

Processes (Monitor): ↑↓ PgUp PgDn Home End select · / filter · s sort field · r reverse · t tree · ←→ fold · c full command · k SIGTERM · K SIGKILL.

🎨 Themes & Customization

Cycle through built-in themes with T: dark · catppuccin · tokyo-night · nord · gruvbox · dracula · light · solarized-light

Custom Themes

You can load custom themes dynamically without recompiling Orbit:

1. Create a themes folder inside your config directory (e.g. ~/.config/orbit/themes/).
2. Drop in a .toml file with your theme name (e.g., cyberpunk.toml).
3. Define your colors using hex codes (bg, accent, surface, etc.).
4. Press T in Orbit to cycle to it.

Want more? There are some community presets (Night Owl, Nightfox, Rosé Pine Dawn and more) in themes/. Copy one over or just orbit link themes/<name>.toml.

🔌 Extensions & Plugins

Orbit is fully extensible via sandboxed WebAssembly (WASM). Anyone can install community widgets or build their own!

Quick Tutorial: Installing Extensions

Browse and install verified extensions directly from the terminal:

# 1. Browse community extensions
orbit browse

# 2. Install any extension (e.g. 3D Crypto Coin)
orbit install crypto_coin

# 3. Enable in ~/.config/orbit/config.toml
orbit enable crypto_coin

Drop the installed widget ID (e.g. "coin") anywhere into your [dashboard.layout] in ~/.config/orbit/config.toml:

[dashboard]
layout = [
    ["system", "coin", "cpu", "storage"],
    ["clock", "media", "processes", "network"],
    ["weather", "calendar", "upnext", "status"]
]

Quick Tutorial: Building Your Own Extension

We provide ready-to-use templates for every extension type:

• Component (Widget): Rust WASM plugin returning a UI widget (templates/component)
• Page (Workspace): Multi-column custom page layout (templates/page)
• Theme (Palette): Custom 9-color TOML palette (templates/theme)

Test your plugin locally in Orbit without publishing:

orbit link /path/to/my_widget.wasm

Explore the official registry and templates: 👉 github.com/ziuus/orbit-integrations

📚 Documentation

• CONFIGURATION.md: Layouts, custom shell widgets, and performance profiles.
• EXTENSIONS.md: Orbit Extension Developer Guide (WASM).
• AGENTS.md: AI Agent architecture guide for modifying Orbit.
• ORBIT_CONFIG_SKILL.md: Prompt instructions for your AI to configure your dashboard.

🏗️ Architecture

All telemetry is collected on a single background sampler thread (/proc, /sys, sysinfo, D-Bus) into lock-guarded snapshots. The render loop only reads snapshots and never blocks on I/O.

Layer	Technology
TUI	Ratatui 0.29 + Crossterm
Telemetry	sysinfo, /proc, /sys/class/{hwmon,drm,power_supply}
GPU	NVIDIA (nvidia-smi), AMD (sysfs), Intel (clock only)
Media	MPRIS over D-Bus (dbus crate)
Audio viz	cava raw output, idle wave fallback

🤝 Contributing

Issues, new themes, and PRs are welcome!

git clone https://github.com/ziuus/orbit-tui.git && cd orbit-tui
cargo run --release

# Ensure CI passes
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test

Read CONTRIBUTING.md first to understand our sampler-thread rule (never do I/O inside a render()) and our UI degradation contract.

Looking for something to work on? Check out our good first issues.

🧩 Ecosystem & Companion Tools

• settings-tui — Lightweight universal Linux Settings Center for your terminal (D-Bus, PipeWire, BlueZ, Hyprland, systemd). The settings management companion to Orbit's system monitoring.

📄 License

MIT — Do what you like, keep the notice.