Questions

What does it cost?

NTerm is free and Apache-2.0 licensed. There is no subscription and no NTerm account. You supply your own AI provider key and pay that provider directly for what you use — usually cents per day.

Do I need an AI key to use it?

No. Sessions, the vault, Cast broadcast, Macros, the toolkit, simulators and themes all work with no key at all. The Do bar and the assist panel need one.

Which vendors are supported?

Cisco IOS/IOS-XE, Palo Alto PAN-OS, FortiOS and Juniper have dialect support in the Do bar and vendor Macro packs. Anything you can reach over SSH, Serial or Telnet works as a terminal regardless of vendor.

Can I just use it as my everyday terminal?

Yes. Open a local shell and NTerm is a terminal with a prompt on it. The Do bar detects the operating system of the session and drafts in that userland: GNU on Linux, BSD on macOS, PowerShell cmdlets on Windows. Ask it to fix file permissions, find what is eating a port, or unpick an rsync flag and you get the spelling your machine actually accepts — not a Linux answer pasted at a Mac.

Does it know macOS is not Linux?

It does, and that is the point. BSD sed -i '' is not GNU sed -i, BSD stat takes different flags, and half the Linux answers on the internet fail silently on a Mac. NTerm resolves against the session it is in before it drafts anything.

Does the Windows shell work properly?

Yes. Windows local shells run PowerShell through ConPTY, so colour, resizing and interactive programs behave like a real console rather than a pipe.

What is in the container?

A working network toolkit, so a local shell inside NTerm is useful immediately: ip, ping, traceroute, dig, nslookup, nc, netstat, ss, curl, wget, telnet, tcpdump, mtr, socat, less, nano and vi.

What happened to chips?

Renamed to Macros. Same saved commands, same vendor filtering — they now live as the third mode of the single command bar, alongside Do and Cast.

Does my config leave my machine?

Only what the AI needs, and only when you use an AI feature. The Do bar sends the last portion of the visible transcript plus your question to the provider you chose. With no key configured, nothing leaves. Captures, credentials and token totals stay local.

Can it change a device without asking?

Only read-only status commands rated low risk run directly. Every command that writes waits for an explicit Confirm. If you find a path around that, it is a security bug — see Security.

Is it really open source?

Yes. Apache License 2.0, the full text is in the repository. You may use, modify, fork and commercialise it, including inside a company.

How is this different from a modern terminal like Warp?

Warp is an excellent local shell for developers, and has moved toward agentic coding. NTerm will run your local shell too — Linux, macOS and Windows PowerShell — but the weight is elsewhere: multi-session SSH, Serial and Telnet, a per-customer credential vault, Cast across a fleet, vendor CLI dialects, offline simulators, and syslog/TFTP/DHCP for bring-up. Warp is built for the machine in front of you. NTerm is built for the hundred you cannot see, and happens to be fine on the one you can.

Can I run it on a server for my team?

Technically yes, but read Security first. NTerm binds to loopback by default for a reason: its per-install token defends against hostile web pages, not against network reach. Put it behind authentication before exposing it.

Windows and macOS installers?

Docker today. Native installers are planned. There is an Electron shell in the repository if you want to build one yourself — that is also how you get a native Windows PowerShell, macOS or Linux local shell rather than a shell inside the container.

What happens if nterm.ai is down?

Nothing. The bench feed falls back to its last cache, then to the content built into the binary. NTerm has no runtime dependency on our servers.