Ptyxis – New Container-Focused Terminal Emulator for GNOME

Prompt, the container-oriented terminal emulator, now is re-named to Ptyxis!

GNOME Developer Christian Hergert announced the Prompt terminal emulator a few months ago. It “marries the best of GNOME Builder’s seamless container support, the beauty of GNOME Text Editor, and the robustness of VTE.” described in the blog post.

Due to name confusion to other product, the terminal emulator now has a new name called “Ptyxis”, according to this post “The extremely nice people at Panic let me know they had a product that might be confused with Prompt and I agreed it could be confusing.”

Ptyxis is a terminal for GNOME with first-class support for containers. It has a small ptyxis-agent that manages PTY, PID tracking, and container monitoring. And, it supports native “user session” even when in Flatpak, as well as Podman, Toolbox, Distrobox, and JHBuild.

How to Install Ptyxis terminal emulator

The project so far is in early development stage. It provides nightly build of Flatpak package that can be installed in most Linux.

Simply, launch a terminal window and run command to install the package:

flatpak install --user --from https://nightly.gnome.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel.flatpakref

Enable flatpak support first (For Debian/Ubuntu, run sudo apt install flatpak), if you don’t have it by following the official setup guide.

Then, either launch it by searching from Gnome overview or start menu, or by running flatpak run org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel command in terminal.

(Optional) To uninstall the terminal emulator, run command:

flatpak uninstall --user --delete-data org.gnome.Ptyxis.Devel