Cortex is a personal fork of Warp — Warp's IDE-grade terminal features wrapped in a look that belongs in the terminal, not a browser. The default Cortex TUI style trades Warp's filled-background tab selection for border-based chrome and minimalist traveling-dot animations, with Fira Code as the bundled default tab-title font.
Cortex tabs visually reflect the state of the CLI agent running inside each session. The Cortex TUI style uses accent-colored borders on selected tabs and a traveling-dot animation (two dots orbiting the border through gaps) to indicate a running agent. An alternative Cortex Modern style with filled-background selection and comet animations is also available. Only Claude Code is supported for agent status detection.
Cortex bundles a large collection of terminal color schemes from four open-source community projects (Gogh, iTerm2-Color-Schemes, base16, terminal.sexy) into a searchable picker, with the option to star favorites. See Credits below.
A persistent saved-projects list lives in the vertical tab sidebar. Add a project once, then open a new session into it from the "+" picker any time after. Projects can also declare sub-projects — useful for monorepos and config trees where you frequently bounce between related working directories.
Every Cortex-exclusive feature is individually toggleable, so you can dial Cortex anywhere from "just upstream Warp" to "fully customized" without forking again. The toggles live in a dedicated settings pane (separate from Warp's own settings), grouped into sections.
Cortex builds from source with Warp's existing build scripts.
macOS / Linux
./script/bootstrap # one-time dependency setup
./script/run # build and launchWindows (PowerShell)
.\script\windows\bootstrap.ps1 # one-time dependency setup
cargo run --bin warp-oss --features gui # build and launchThat's the whole flow. See WARP.md for Warp's engineering guide, or CLAUDE.md if you want to develop Cortex itself.
-
Warp — the terminal Cortex sits on top of. None of this exists without their work, and especially their decision to open-source the client. Cortex inherits Warp's license split (MIT for
warpui_coreandwarpui, AGPL-3.0 for the rest). -
Fira Code — bundled as the default tab-title font for the Cortex TUI style (SIL OFL 1.1).
-
Color themes — bundled from four open-source community libraries:
- Gogh — ~361 schemes (MIT)
- iTerm2-Color-Schemes — ~381 schemes (MIT; individual schemes retain their original copyright)
- base16 — ~179 schemes (MIT)
- terminal.sexy — ~157 schemes (MIT)
Each theme's display name preserves its source tag (e.g. "3024 (base16)", "Adventure Time (Gogh)"). The hand-curated default themes shipped with Warp are separate from this bundled library.
Cortex inherits Warp's licensing. The warpui_core and warpui crates are MIT; everything else is AGPL-3.0.
Cortex doesn't ship with formal support, but I use it every day and I'm open to looking at issues or PRs that touch Cortex-specific code — no promises on response time. For bugs in upstream Warp behavior, file at warpdotdev/warp.