Getting Started

Install Blade and launch your first terminal session.

Installation

Blade is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Choose your platform below.

Installer

Scoop (recommended)

scoop install blade

This installs Blade and adds it to your PATH automatically.

DMG installer

Homebrew (recommended)

brew install blade-term

Tarball

tar -xzf blade-linux-x86_64.tar.gz sudo mv blade /usr/local/bin/

Cargo (build from source)

cargo install blade-term

First Launch

After installation, launch Blade from your application launcher or by running blade in an existing terminal. Blade will:

  1. Detect your default shell (PowerShell on Windows, zsh/bash on macOS/Linux)
  2. Create a PTY session connected to your shell
  3. Start the GPU-accelerated rendering pipeline

You should see your shell prompt within a second. Try a command like echo hello to verify everything is working.

Verify with blade doctor

Run blade doctor to check that everything is configured correctly. It tests your GPU, fonts, config file, and PTY connection.

$ blade doctor Blade Diagnostics GPU NVIDIA RTX 4090 (Vulkan 1.3) Font MiSans (ligatures: on) PTY ConPTY v2.0 (Windows 11) Render 144 FPS (vsync, 2 draw calls) Latency 2.3ms (input-to-pixel) All checks passed
Tip: If blade doctor reports issues, see the Troubleshooting guide for solutions.

Config File Location

Blade looks for its configuration file in these locations (in order):

PlatformPath
Windows%APPDATA%\blade\blade.toml
macOS~/.config/blade/blade.toml
Linux~/.config/blade/blade.toml
Any./blade.toml (current directory)

If no config file exists, Blade uses sensible defaults. You can also specify a custom path:

blade --config /path/to/blade.toml

Next Steps