What’s new in ttyx_ vs Tilix

ttyx_ is a fork of Tilix that picks up where upstream development stalled. This page summarizes what has changed: new features, security hardening, bug fixes, and infrastructure work.

For version-by-version release notes, see the changelog.

Security hardening

The headline difference. ttyx_ adds a Preferences → Advanced → Security panel and ships the following protections; none of them exist in upstream Tilix.

Paste protection

  • Bracketed paste escape stripping silently removes ESC[200~ / ESC[201~ sequences that could break out of the shell’s paste-mode and inject commands. Always active, no option to disable.
  • Multi-line paste review shows a review dialog before pasting multi-line content, so you can inspect and edit before the text reaches the shell. Default: on.
  • Dangerous command detection flags pastes containing sudo, su, rm -rf, curl | bash, dd if=, mkfs, chmod 777, fork bombs, and similar patterns.
  • Per-paste warnings — the unsafe-paste warning now appears every time, not just once per session.

Clipboard protection

  • Clipboard auto-clear — automatically clears the clipboard after a configurable 5–300 s timeout following a copy from the terminal, preventing sensitive data like passwords and tokens from lingering. Only clears if the clipboard still holds the content you copied. Default: off, 30 s.

Visual indicators

  • Root indicator — red tint and “as root” label when any process in the terminal is running with elevated privileges.
  • SSH indicator — blue tint and “ssh” label when connected via ssh, scp, sftp, mosh, or sshfs.

Memory protection

  • Core dump protection — the process is marked non-dumpable via prctl(PR_SET_DUMPABLE, 0), blocking /proc/pid/mem reads and core-dump generation. Disable from preferences if you need to attach GDB.
  • In-memory-only scrollback — the unlimited scrollback option was removed; the scrollback is capped at 256–999,999 lines and kept entirely in memory. VTE never writes history to disk.
  • Secure Clear (Ctrl+Shift+L) — on-demand wipe of the scrollback buffer, available in the hamburger menu and the right-click context menu.

Logging hygiene

  • Sensitive environment variables (proxy URLs, tokens, passwords, secrets) are redacted before being written to trace logs.
  • Command-line arguments and clicked-hyperlink traces have their URL userinfo stripped before logging.
  • When file logging is enabled, the log file is written to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ttyx.log (mode 0700 by systemd convention) instead of world-readable /tmp/ttyx.log.

Fixed bugs carried over from upstream

Upstream Tilix development stalled with known issues unresolved. ttyx_ ships fixes for:

  • Crash on malformed OSC 7 URIs and drag-and-drop payloads.
  • Color schemes incorrectly shown as “Custom” when use-theme-colors was enabled.
  • Title bar markup rendering using setText instead of setMarkup.
  • Focus stealing on terminal restart.
  • Proxy host protocol prefix duplication in generated env vars.
  • Preferences dialog segfaults when changing profiles or closing the dialog, including a GC-interaction crash on GLib 2.84+ (Flatpak).
  • Empty clipboard after whitespace stripping.
  • Root/SSH indicators not clearing when the foreground process exits.
  • Password-manager delete silently failing for legacy-schema entries and claiming success even when the keyring operation failed.
  • Malformed proxy URL with a redundant leading @, plus unencoded credentials that broke the URL if they contained @, :, or /.
  • https_proxy never received authentication credentials even when configured.
  • Symlink-attack susceptibility during the Tilix → ttyx_ config migration.

New features and quality-of-life improvements

  • New tabs open next to the current tab (not at the end).
  • Strip trailing whitespace on copy — optional toggle.
  • ~ and @ added to default word-select characters — double-click selects full paths and email-like tokens.
  • 8 new color schemes ship in-box: Catppuccin (Latte, Mocha), Dracula, Gruvbox (Dark, Light), Nord, One Dark, Tokyo Night.

Performance

  • ProcessMonitor optimization cut idle CPU from 1.4% to 0.1% by replacing full /proc scans with targeted foreground-process lookups.
  • Release build optimizations — proper -O3, -release, -inline, -boundscheck=off flags for both Meson and Dub; binary size dropped from 17 MB (debug) to 3.3 MB (release, stripped).

Infrastructure

  • Unit test suite — from zero to more than 119 tests covering security, clipboard, rendering, process monitoring, and the extracted utility modules. Test count continues to grow with each refactor.
  • Major terminal.d decomposition — ClipboardHandler, TerminalRenderer, ProcessQuery, SpawnHandler, FlatpakHostCommands, and geometry / string / proc helpers were extracted from what was originally a 178 KB monolithic widget file.
  • PreferenceRegistry pattern replaces the switch-based preference dispatch.
  • CI coverage across Debian Stable, Debian Testing, and Ubuntu LTS via Podman containers, plus Dub builds with both DMD and LDC.

Identity and migration

  • ttyx_ uses its own schema identifier (io.github.gwelr.ttyx) for GSettings.
  • libsecret entries use io.github.gwelr.ttyx.Password; legacy entries stored under com.gexperts.tilix.Password are still read on first run.
  • Shells inside terminals get both TTYX_ID and TILIX_ID set, so existing shell-integration scripts continue to work.
  • On first run, ~/.config/tilix/ is copied to ~/.config/ttyx/; the original is left in place as a backup.

See Migrating from Tilix for the full migration checklist.

Manual content adapted from the original Tilix by Gerald Nunn under MPL-2.0.

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