Wave Terminal: The All-in-One Open-Source Terminal with Built-in AI

The Linux desktop has evolved with AI tools that make life on Linux easier. Now, you can use AI superpowers directly in your terminal to work more efficiently and quickly.

As a developer or sysadmin, you'll spend a lot of time in the terminal, whether to complete daily tasks or work on an entire coding project.

For this reason, you'll need a powerful terminal application that can handle everything without the need to switch to another application to complete your tasks.

If you've been following our AI series, we introduced a similar tool for this purpose called Warp. Today, we have another tool that does almost the same job, with some extra features that Warp doesn't have. You can try both and see which works better for your needs and workflow.

Wave Terminal is an all-in-one terminal with the ability to preview files, open a browser, support AI, and many other cool features that we'll explore in this guide.

What is Wave Terminal

As explained on their website, Wave Terminal is everything you need from a modern terminal. Wave is an open-source project, unlike Warp, which is a closed-source project. If you're an open-source advocate, this will likely make you choose Wave as your terminal.

A terminal application contains sensitive information. It’s where you type credentials, API tokens, etc., so you need to place a lot of trust in the application and the company behind it, especially if it’s a closed-source app. With Wave, you don’t need to worry about this - it's fully open-source, and you can find the code in the GitHub repo.

Wave is written in Go and TypeScript, which makes it both powerful and stable. It has a modern design, supports most popular shells, and includes many features, such as:

• A built-in editor for editing files, with support for syntax highlighting and all the modern features you expect in modern editors.
• AI support through AI chat (an AI tool that uses different LLMs in the backend).
• A preview system for almost all formats, like Markdown, PDF, video, etc.
• A powerful theme customization system and workspace management.

And many other features and functionalities that you'll discover as you start using the terminal.

Install Wave Terminal in Linux

Wave is a cross-platform application that can be installed on macOS, Windows, and Linux. To install it on Linux, you must have an x64 architecture, and in case you use Ubuntu, you must have a version later than 20.04.

There are two ways to install Wave on Linux, either using the Snap package:

sudo snap install --classic waveterm

Or use the installer provided by Wave, which can be found here. Choose the right version depending on which distribution you are using.

After the installation, the home screen looks like this:

On the home screen, you can clearly see all the features that Wave offers. It has almost everything you need, from the browser to file viewing to the AI, and you can start using them easily.

If you close all the windows, you can use the sidebar on the right side to open them.

How to Chat with AI in Wave

As we mentioned earlier, Wave has support for AI thanks to AIChat. You can directly start chatting and asking the AI for help without any need for an API key or anything like that.

Use the window for the AI:

You control the window, you can resize it as you like. You can see that it’s using OpenAI under the hood, which makes the responses more accurate.

You can copy text or commands from the output easily.

How to Use Wave's Integrated Browser

Wave has a fully functional browser that can be used to search and see results. Open the web tab in the right sidebar and start using the browser:

Now, with Wave, there's no need to open a separate browser to see something; you have everything you need inside your terminal.

How to Use Wave’s File Viewer

Another useful feature that Wave has is the ability to view files in almost all formats, even videos are supported.

Use the same sidebar to open files in case the window is closed. Use your mouse or the arrow keys and press Enter to view and search through files.

You can view images with the ability to zoom in and out, view PDF files, and watch videos inside your terminal.

There are a lot of functionalities that are super powerful and can be directly used in Wave, all inside the terminal without the need to leave.

How to Configure Wave Terminal

You may notice that there is no option to configure the Wave Terminal inside the application (each block has some settings applied to it), but we can add the configuration inside the file in ~/.config/waveterm/presets.

Inside this location, you can add a new file with the extension .json and specify the configuration you want, starting from background settings to adding and controlling the AI provider in case you want to use another LLM.

For example, to customize the background, you can create a file inside the presets called bg.json with the following config:

{
  "bg@ocean": {
    "display:name": "Ocean Scene",
    "bg:*": true,
    "bg": "url('/path/to/ocean.jpg') center/cover no-repeat",
    "bg:opacity": 0.2
  }
}

The url part contains the path to the image you want to specify. Gradient colors are also supported, and you can use them.

Summary

Wave Term, is a good choice if you are looking for an all-in-one terminal that has the features and things you need, whether you are coding or just doing some daily tasks. Compared to Warp, it is a good open-source alternative.

In case you need more AI tools in Linux, make sure you check the AI series, where we explain tools in Linux to boost learning and productivity.