Meshtastic Terminal

A terminal interface for chatting via Meshtastic.

Overview

Meshtastic Terminal is a modern terminal UI for real-time communication over Meshtastic mesh networks. Monitor messages, send texts, and manage your mesh network directly from your terminal.

Features

• Real-time message display with timestamps
• Node discovery tracking
• Radio configuration display (preset/region)
• Live node counter in header, plus other stats
• Press 's' to send a message
• Press 'd' to send a direct message (select from a list of discovered nodes)
• Press 'q' to quit
• Press 'h' to toggle the hop count display
• Automatically reconnects if the device is disconnected / your computer sleeps
• Ability to switch radio presets/modes and frequency slots on the fly
• Node list - press ctrl+n to view the list of discovered nodes / view details
• Raw monitor mode - press ctrl+r to toggle raw packet monitor mode
• Click a message in the chat to reply
• Theme support - press ctrl+p to open the theme selector

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or higher
• A Meshtastic device connected via USB/serial
• uv - Fast Python package installer and resolver

Quickstart

If you have uv installed, you can run Meshtastic Terminal directly without cloning:

uvx --from "git+https://github.com/richstokes/meshtastic_terminal.git" meshtastic-tui

This will automatically download, install dependencies, and run the application in one command!

Installation

1. Install uv (if not already installed)

On macOS/Linux:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Or using Homebrew:

brew install uv

For other installation methods, see uv documentation.

2. Clone or download this repository

gh repo clone richstokes/meshtastic_terminal
cd meshtastic_terminal

3. Install dependencies with uv

uv sync

This will:

• Create a virtual environment (if needed)
• Install all required dependencies
• Make the scripts available for execution

Usage

Running Meshtastic Terminal

The recommended way to run the terminal interface is using uv run:

uv run python meshtastic_tui.py

OR to auto-detect and connect to the first detected Meshtastic device:

uv run python meshtastic_tui.py -a

BLE / Bluetooth connection

To connect to a Meshtastic device over Bluetooth, use the -b flag:

uv run python meshtastic_tui.py -b

Contributing

Feel free to submit issues or pull requests to improve these scripts!