Terminal Renderers

Updated August 9, 2026

crystl gives you two terminal surfaces in Settings → general → terminal → TERMINAL RENDERING. Leave the picker on Prism unless you have a specific compatibility reason to use xterm.

Prism

Prism is the default and recommended surface. It draws with Metal on top of crystl’s cavrn terminal engine, so it can keep many streaming shards light while preserving structured information about what ran.

Prism is also where the richer terminal features live:

  • structured blocks and width-immutable scrollback
  • clickable collapsed tool-call rows
  • indexed shell commands and complete retained output through crystl commands
  • command-to-command navigation in scrollback

xterm

xterm is the supported fallback. Pick it when a program behaves badly on Prism or you need to narrow down a renderer-specific problem.

Your terminal, shell, agents, chat dock, and transcript history still work. Prism-only structure and interactions are unavailable until you switch back.

When the change applies

The picker applies to terminals opened after you change it. Already-open shards keep the surface they started with, so you can finish their work without a renderer swap underneath them.

You can inspect the current choice for free from a shard:

crystl settings get terminal_surface

Guild members can change it from the CLI too:

crystl settings set terminal_surface prism
crystl settings set terminal_surface xterm

See the CLI reference for the full settings allowlist.