Shell Pilot 1.17.0

August 28, 2026

An interface pass built on macOS 26. The window is translucent, the chrome that floats over the terminal is Liquid Glass, and scrolling no longer moves in coarse jumps.

A translucent window

The terminal background is now drawn at an adjustable opacity over a real behind-window vibrancy layer, so your desktop blurs through the window rather than being hidden behind it. Settings › Appearance has an opacity slider and a backdrop picker.

It ships at 85% opaque — enough to read as glass while keeping terminal text at essentially full contrast. If you want the old solid window back, drag the slider one notch to the right; the setting is remembered.

Transparency also survives the renderer switch. Shell Pilot moves to the Metal renderer automatically whenever a full-screen terminal app runs, and CAMetalLayer is opaque by default — the background would have snapped back to solid the moment you opened vim or htop. The Metal layer is now configured to match.

A real sidebar

• The sidebar is a proper NavigationSplitView instead of a hand-built stack, which brings the system sidebar toggle, a resizable divider and unified toolbar behavior.
• It also brings the system's own sidebar vibrancy — the previous hardcoded blue-grey gradient was painting over it.
• The working directory moved to the window subtitle. As a toolbar item it competed for width with the toolbar buttons and was the first thing to get squeezed.

Liquid Glass

• The find bar, both suggestion lists, the inline command description and the man-page panel are now glass.
• The two suggestion lists share one pane of glass and morph apart when only one is on screen, instead of cross-fading as two separate cards.
• The man-page side panel is a proper inspector column, so it can be resized.

Settings is a real settings window

⌘, now opens a tabbed Settings window — General, Appearance, Terminal, Shortcuts, Assistance, Updates. It replaces the 180° card flip that rotated the terminal out of view to show a settings pane. The terminal stays visible and running behind it, and the settings view is no longer mounted and animating for the entire life of the window.

Smooth scrolling

Scrolling used to move in coarse steps: the underlying terminal library bucketed the scroll delta into 1, 3, 10 or one-page jumps and threw the remainder away, so a 0.7pt trackpad nudge moved a whole row and a 2pt nudge moved three.

Scroll deltas now accumulate and convert to whole rows as they cross them, so a trackpad tracks 1:1 with your fingers and momentum decays smoothly instead of hitting a 3× cliff. Traditional mouse wheels get the macOS-standard three rows per detent.

Autocomplete accepts with →

The suggestion overlay now accepts the highlighted suggestion with Right Arrow rather than Return, matching fish and zsh-autosuggestions. Return always runs what you actually typed instead of silently swapping in a suggestion.

Accessibility

• Reduce Transparency forces an opaque window and solid chrome. The opacity slider disables itself and says why, rather than silently doing nothing.
• Reduce Motion shortens the interface animations.
• Both are observed live — toggling them in System Settings takes effect without relaunching.

Under the hood

• Colour is semantic throughout. Twelve hardcoded RGB literals and around forty light/dark opacity ladders were replaced with AppKit semantic colours. Hand-rolled opacities are computed against an assumed backdrop, so they turned muddy over vibrancy and ignored both your accent colour and Increase Contrast.
• 226 tests passing, up from 204. The new scroll-accumulator tests caught a real drift bug: a long flick came up one row short, because 2pt over a 20pt cell is 0.1 and a hundred of those sum to just under ten.

Known limits

• The app is not notarized, so a first install still shows a Gatekeeper prompt.
• Pinned toolbar shortcuts plus the Shortcuts menu can still spill into the toolbar overflow chevron on a narrow window.