Wave Terminal Review — Block-Based AI Workspace, Honestly Tested
Wave Terminal rethinks the terminal around blocks, AI chat, and inline graphics. We spent two weeks running real work inside it. Here is what holds up and what does not.
Wave Terminal is the most ambitious thing happening in the terminal category right now, and it gets the least honest coverage. Every review of it is either a launch puff piece or a one-paragraph dismissal. Neither is useful if you are deciding whether to actually adopt it.
We ran Wave for two weeks across real work — Claude Code sessions, log diving, file munging, the usual. This is the review we wished existed before we started.
What Wave actually is
Wave is an open-source terminal that replaces the linear scrollback with blocks. Every command, every AI chat, every file preview, every browser embed lives in a discrete block on a tiled workspace. You can drag them, resize them, group them, save them as named layouts.
It also ships AI chat as a first-class block type, inline graphics rendering (PNG, charts, PDFs), and a sidebar for workspaces. The thing is genuinely well-built. The team has shipped fast and the UI feels like 2026, not 2008.
What it is not: a drop-in iTerm2 replacement. If you try to use Wave the way you use a traditional terminal, you will fight it constantly.
What works
Inline file previews. Open a CSV, get a real table. Open a PDF, get a real PDF. Open a PNG, see the PNG. This is the killer feature of Wave and it really is as nice as it sounds for any data-heavy work. Anyone who has spent thirty minutes piping a CSV through column -t will feel a small wave of relief.
Workspaces with persistence. Save a layout for "infra debugging" — three SSH blocks, a logs block, an AI chat block — and restore it next week. The mental cost of context-switching between projects drops noticeably.
Block-level AI chat. You can ask the AI block about the contents of an adjacent terminal block. This is the most coherent vendor implementation of "AI that sees your terminal" we have used. Better than Warp's, frankly, because the boundaries between "your shell" and "the AI" are explicit instead of fused.
Free and open source. No subscription gate on the core product. The optional cloud sync is paid; everything local is free.
What does not work
Running CLI agents inside Wave is awkward. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI — these are streaming-heavy, multi-line, ANSI-rich processes. Wave's block model means each new long-running command spawns rendering choices that do not always go well. Claude Code mostly works, but visual glitches (orphaned cursor, stuck redraws, status bar artifacts) show up often enough to notice.
The block paradigm fights muscle memory. If you are used to twenty years of "type a command, get output, scroll, repeat," Wave's blocks feel like extra work for the first few days. By day five you have either adapted or given up. There is no middle ground.
It is electron-based and feels it. Resize lag, occasional jank, memory footprint in the 400-800MB range. Not a dealbreaker — most of the modern terminal pack is electron — but you will feel the difference if you are coming from Ghostty or Alacritty.
The AI is good but generic. Wave's AI is a thin layer over OpenAI by default. It works. It is not anyone's preferred coding agent. If you already use Claude Code or Gemini CLI seriously, you will run those inside Wave rather than using Wave's built-in AI — which brings back the "running CLI agents inside Wave is awkward" problem above.
Who Wave is for
Wave is great if you want a single tool for data-shaped work: SSH-and-investigate, log-and-graph, debug-and-visualize. Where the blocks earn their keep is when each block is doing something visually distinct and you want to see them at once. If your typical day is six terminal tabs all running shells, Wave is overkill.
Wave is also great if you want the most ambitious open-source terminal currently shipping and you are willing to learn a new mental model. Some of the early Vim adopters were people who recognized that the strangeness was load-bearing. Wave is in that same category — the strangeness is the point, and either it clicks or it does not.
Who Wave is not for
People running a CLI agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI) all day. The visual glitches and block-model friction add up. You are better off using a shell built specifically for AI agents and keeping Wave around for the data-shaped work where it shines.
People who want a fast, minimal, "stay out of the way" terminal. That is Ghostty's job, and Ghostty does it better.
People who are skeptical of new paradigms. Wave asks you to learn things. If you do not enjoy that, the friction will outweigh the payoff.
The MOLTamp comparison, since people ask
We make MOLTamp, a skinnable shell built specifically for AI CLI agents. The honest framing: MOLTamp and Wave are not competitors. They optimize for different jobs.
Wave is best when you want a tiled workspace for heterogeneous work — a CSV block, an SSH block, a chat block, all visible at once. MOLTamp is best when you want a deeply visual environment for a long Claude Code or Codex session, with skins, widgets, music, and zero competition between your agent and a built-in AI.
Most developers who have used both end up running them side by side: Wave when the day involves a lot of data poking, MOLTamp when the day is mostly agent work. There is no requirement to pick one.
The bottom line
Wave is a serious tool. It is the most interesting terminal currently being built. Whether it is the right tool for you depends on what your day actually looks like — and the only way to learn that is to spend a week inside it.
If your day is dominated by CLI agents, look at the broader AI terminal comparison before settling on Wave. If your day is dominated by data wrangling, just install Wave and try it. The free tier covers everything that matters.