Install

Install Tasty for your computer and open your first terminal. Below you will find installation steps for each OS, along with how to update or uninstall.

Download the installer from the GitHub releases page. Install scripts and package-manager distribution (apt repositories, Homebrew, winget, and so on) are not currently available.

Choosing an install file

{ver} stands for the version (e.g. 0.10.3).

You can verify a downloaded file against the SHA256SUMS-*.txt for its OS.

The download button on the site’s front page links straight to a file only when one matches both the OS and the architecture your browser reports. When the architecture is unknown it opens the releases page instead, so pick the file for your computer’s architecture from the table above.

Linux

# .deb (Debian / Ubuntu / Mint)
sudo apt install ./tasty_{ver}-1_amd64.deb

# .rpm (Fedora / RHEL / openSUSE)
sudo dnf install ./tasty-{ver}-1.x86_64.rpm

# .AppImage — run without installing
chmod +x Tasty-{ver}-x86_64.AppImage && ./Tasty-{ver}-x86_64.AppImage
# If FUSE is not available
./Tasty-{ver}-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run

# .tar.gz — extract and run directly
tar -xzf tasty-{ver}-linux-x64.tar.gz && ./tasty-linux-x64/tasty

• .deb / .rpm put the tasty command on PATH and add an icon to the app menu. The package manager installs the required libraries.
• GPU acceleration (Vulkan) is used when libvulkan1 / vulkan-loader is present. Without it, Tasty still installs and runs, using OpenGL, or software rendering if that fails too.
• zenity is a recommended package. Tasty uses it to show a notice when a new launch cannot be handed to the Tasty that is already running. Without it, a desktop notification is shown instead.
• .AppImage bundles libraries used to run Tasty. You register it in the app menu yourself (use appimaged, or put a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/).
• .tar.gz requires you to set up PATH and the menu entry yourself. If a required system library is missing, tasty tells you what is missing and exits.
• The licence notices (Tasty’s MIT text, the licence texts of the bundled font and markdown rendering engines, and the third-party notice document) travel inside the artifacts. .deb keeps them in /usr/share/doc/tasty/, .rpm and .AppImage in usr/share/licenses/tasty/, and .tar.gz at the top of the extracted directory.
• The build baseline is Ubuntu 24.04 (glibc 2.39), so on older distributions (Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, etc.) it may fail to start with a GLIBC_2.39 not found error. No separate build is provided for older distributions.
• The HTML and Markdown viewers need WebKitGTK 2.40 or later. The libwebkit2gtk-4.1 of the Ubuntu 24.04 build baseline meets this.

macOS

1. Open the .dmg and drag Tasty.app into the Applications folder.
2. If an “unidentified developer” warning appears on first launch, allow it in System Settings > Privacy & Security.

To clear the warning directly from the terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tasty.app

After the first launch, macOS may show permission prompts for the Downloads, Documents, and Desktop folders, followed by Screen Recording. Which prompts appear depends on prior permission choices and macOS policy. Why they appear and how to answer them is in Troubleshooting.

Windows

On a Windows ARM device, download the files with windows-arm64 in the name. ARM64 files ship in releases newer than 0.12.2, and installing and running them on a Windows ARM device has not been checked yet. Running the x64 files of releases up to 0.12.2, which have no ARM64 files, on a Windows ARM device has not been checked either.

• .msi (recommended) — Double-click and follow the setup wizard. A Start menu shortcut and an “Apps & features” uninstall entry are registered.
• .zip — Extract to any folder and run tasty.exe.

Expand-Archive tasty-{ver}-windows-x64.zip -DestinationPath tasty
.\tasty\tasty.exe

On first launch a “Windows protected your PC” warning appears (the binary is not code-signed). Click More info → Run anyway.

On Windows, Tasty uses Git Bash as its shell. If you start Tasty for the first time without Git for Windows, a Choose a shell screen appears instead of a terminal. Enter the path to bash.exe and press Use this shell to start with that shell, or press Quit to close Tasty. Use this shell is available only when the path is a bash or zsh executable. Once Tasty is running, if the configured shell path is not valid, the Terminal tab of the settings window shows a “Git Bash not found” notice. In that case install Git for Windows, or set the bash path yourself under Settings > Terminal > Shell.

First launch

• When the window opens, one Workspace and one terminal are ready. The screen layout is explained in A first look.
• The UI language defaults to English. To switch to Korean, pick Korean under Settings > General > Language, save, and restart Tasty. You can also write it directly into ~/.tasty/config.toml:

[general]
language = "ko"

Check from the terminal that the install worked. The second command only responds while Tasty is running.

tasty --version      # e.g. tasty 0.10.3
tasty list info      # version · Workspace count of the running Tasty

Shells opened inside Tasty get the tasty command on PATH automatically. On macOS, to use it from other terminal apps or scripts as well, add /Applications/Tasty.app/Contents/MacOS/tasty to PATH or create a symbolic link. The Windows .zip build likewise needs the extracted folder added to PATH.

GPU requirements

Tasty draws its screen with the GPU (Vulkan / DirectX 12 / Metal). If there is no GPU it tries once more with a software renderer, and if that fails too it exits without opening a window. No error is shown on screen; “No GPU adapter found” is written to the log (~/.tasty/debug.log, and the terminal output when launched from a terminal). Installing or updating the GPU driver resolves this in most cases. Every install file without headless in its name is a GUI build. To run on a server without a graphical desktop, use the headless build below.

Headless build

A headless build, which runs Tasty on a server without a window, is published on the releases page as an archive for each OS (named tasty-headless-…). You just extract it; it is not distributed as an install file such as .deb, .rpm, .AppImage, .dmg, or .msi. The executable is named tasty in both the GUI and headless builds, so extract it into a different folder from the GUI build. The bundled plugins are included in the archive’s plugins/ folder.

# Linux (for aarch64, replace x64 with arm64)
tar -xzf tasty-headless-{ver}-linux-x64.tar.gz && ./tasty-headless-linux-x64/tasty

# macOS (Apple Silicon)
tar -xzf tasty-headless-{ver}-macos-arm64.tar.gz && ./tasty-headless-macos-arm64/tasty

# Windows (for ARM64, replace x64 with arm64)
Expand-Archive tasty-headless-{ver}-windows-x64.zip -DestinationPath tasty-headless
.\tasty-headless\tasty.exe

On macOS, a file downloaded with a browser may show an “unidentified developer” warning when you run it. In that case, clear the quarantine flag with xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine tasty-headless-macos-arm64.

The headless build’s tasty starts without a window even with no options, and you create and drive its terminals only through the tasty CLI. From another computer you can bring its workspaces in with remote attach. Running a GUI build with --headless does not start it without a window; it starts the GUI as usual.

Where no archive is published (for example, an Intel Mac), build it yourself from source on a machine with Rust installed.

git clone https://github.com/zilhak/tasty.git
cd tasty
cargo build --release --no-default-features
./target/release/tasty

Updating

There is no auto-update and no new-version notification. Download the new version from the releases page and install it again the same way.

• Linux .deb / .rpm: run the same command with the new file and it installs over the old one.
• macOS: overwrite Tasty.app in Applications with the new one.
• Windows .msi: running the new .msi upgrades it. User data (~/.tasty/) is left as is.

Settings · sessions · themes all live in ~/.tasty/, so they survive updates.

Uninstalling

On Windows, ~ is %USERPROFILE% (usually C:\Users\<name>).

Install locations

~/.tasty/ holds the settings (config.toml), the IPC port of the running Tasty (tasty.port), layouts, themes, and logs. The main files are covered in Settings and Troubleshooting.