Making a terminal watch face because terminal are cool

November 13, 2025

Cyprien

What?

I wrote a terminal-looking watch face for my Apple Watch

Why?

Because I think that terminal are really cool, and I really wanted to try to make something for one of my devices.

How?

I had to 1. enable Developer Mode on my watch and 2. use XCode to write Swift code and install it on my watch.

Where?

cyprienhm/watch-terminal-sh/ ->

Little notes about the project

I own an Apple Watch SE 2. I've always wanted to be able to customize its look.

In the past I found kuglee/TermiWatch ->, and I thought it looked really nice. But its last commit was 3 years ago at the time of writing, and the build failed in XCode for me.

So I embarked on a tiny journey to make my own terminal watch face.

I quickly realized that Apple Watch watch faces fall into 2 categories:

Apps: fully customizable, but as an app they have limited ability to be interactive, and cannot be made "permanent" (the watch will revert back to the native watch face after a duration).
Custom complications that work on the native watch face: those have the advantage of integrating with the native watch face, but they're limited in terms of customizability.

I decided to go with an app because I wanted to be able to put whatever I wanted on the screen. My goal was to take inspiration from kuglee/TermiWatch ->, but make it look a bit more like the output a "minimal" fetch/fastfetch.

The dev experience

I had never developed an app for an Apple device before, and never used Xcode. Going through the hoops of setting up my Apple account as a "developer account" felt kind of unnecessary for developing an app for my own device, that only I wanted to use.

The major pain point was transferring the app from my laptop to the watch itself. So many times, the connection between the watch and the laptop failed, and getting it to work again consisted of random Xcode restarts, hopeful reboots, and prayers to the gods of mobile development.

Concluding thoughts

In the end, I wish that I could tell my watch to maintain the app open, so that I could use the watch face seamlessly.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the way it looks. Even though my girlfriend was not impressed.