tiletopia

A Windows desktop app for running and arranging many WSL terminals at once. Built primarily to manage multiple claude sessions across projects in parallel, but works for any multi-shell workflow.

Status: early — single-pane M1 works. Tiling layout (M2), workspace persistence (M3), and cross-pane orchestration (M4) are the next milestones. See memory.md.

Stack

• Tauri 2 (Rust backend, WebView2 frontend) — small bundle, native Windows installer via NSIS.
• Svelte 5 + TypeScript + Vite + pnpm.
• xterm.js + @xterm/addon-fit for terminal rendering.
• portable-pty (Rust crate) spawning wsl.exe -d <distro> PTYs.

Run

This project targets Windows. Dev requires:

• Windows 10/11 + WebView2 Runtime (preinstalled on Win11).
• MSVC toolchain (VS Build Tools, "C++ build tools" workload).
• Rust on the Windows host.
• Node 20+ and pnpm (corepack use pnpm@11.2.2).
• WSL with at least one distro installed.

Location matters. The source must live on a Windows-native drive (here: D:\dev\tiletopia\). Don't run pnpm against the \\wsl.localhost\... UNC path — pnpm 11.x crashes inside isDriveExFat and the actual error gets swallowed by the crashing error-hint formatter.

From a Windows shell:

cd D:\dev\tiletopia
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev          # iterate
pnpm tauri build        # NSIS installer at src-tauri\target\release\bundle\nsis\

The WSL-side symlink at ~/claude/projects/tiletopia points here for in-WSL editing.

How it works (current state)

• Backend (src-tauri/src/pty.rs): a PtyManager holding a Mutex<HashMap<PaneId, PaneHandle>> of portable-pty children. Each spawned pane gets a background reader thread that emits pane://{id}/data events to the frontend (base64-encoded byte chunks). Counterparts: write_to_pane, resize_pane, kill_pane. Distro enumeration parses wsl.exe -l -q (UTF-16LE).
• Frontend (src/components/XtermPane.svelte): xterm.js + FitAddon mounted into a div. On mount, calls spawn_pane, subscribes to the pane's event stream, wires term.onData → write_to_pane, and uses a ResizeObserver to forward dimension changes to the PTY.
• App (src/App.svelte): titlebar with clickable distro buttons (auto-picks first non-docker-desktop distro; user can override). One XtermPane wrapped in {#key selected} so changing distro destroys + respawns the pane.

Layout

tiletopia/
├── CLAUDE.md, memory.md, README.md
├── .gitignore, pnpm-workspace.yaml
├── package.json, vite.config.ts, svelte.config.js, tsconfig.json, tsconfig.node.json
├── index.html
├── src/
│   ├── main.ts          # mounts App, imports xterm.css
│   ├── App.svelte       # titlebar + one XtermPane (M1)
│   ├── styles.css
│   ├── ipc.ts           # typed Tauri command wrappers
│   └── components/
│       └── XtermPane.svelte
└── src-tauri/
    ├── Cargo.toml, build.rs, tauri.conf.json
    ├── capabilities/default.json
    ├── icons/                # placeholder, copied from claude-usage-widget
    └── src/
        ├── main.rs
        ├── lib.rs       # tauri builder, registers commands, manages PtyManager
        ├── pty.rs       # PtyManager + list_wsl_distros
        └── commands.rs  # #[tauri::command] surface

Known gotchas (today)

• Don't pnpm install from a UNC path (\\wsl.localhost\...). pnpm 11.x crashes in its isDriveExFat probe; the underlying error gets swallowed.
• Console flash on wsl.exe -l -q: suppressed via the CREATE_NO_WINDOW flag in pty.rs. The PTY itself doesn't allocate a console (portable-pty uses ConPTY directly).
• base64 wire format: xterm.js emits string from onData; we UTF-8 encode then base64. Not the fastest; switch to typed-array event payloads later if throughput is an issue.
• No icons of our own: copied from claude-usage-widget. Replace before any release.
• Cargo build only works on Windows host — Rust toolchain isn't installed in WSL. pnpm check runs in WSL and validates the Svelte/TS side.