Xfce Terminal

Xfce Terminal (xfce4-terminal) is the terminal emulator of the Xfce desktop, written in C on GTK 3 and the VTE terminal widget, the same library GNOME Terminal uses, and licensed under GPL-2.0. It is developed on Xfce's own GitLab, with a read-only mirror on GitHub. It suits Xfce users and anyone who wants a light GTK terminal with tabs and a drop-down mode built in.

Since version 1.1.0 settings are stored in Xfconf, Xfce's configuration system, and edited in a preferences dialog that includes an embedded shortcuts editor. The preferences cover fonts, colors and transparent backgrounds, scrollback (which can be unlimited), and the drop-down window's size, position and monitor. Some options are hidden settings without a control in the dialog. By default new windows open in a single running process, which --disable-server turns off.

Windows hold tabs, which can be detached into new windows. xfce4-terminal --drop-down opens a drop-down terminal that is toggled by running the same command again, typically from a keyboard shortcut, and it has worked on Wayland as well as X11 in recent releases. Other features include search, clickable URLs and OSC 8 hyperlinks, an unsafe-paste warning dialog, and Sixel image support, added in 1.1.0, which depends on VTE being built with Sixel enabled.

There are no split panes, no GPU renderer and no programming-font ligatures. The README notes that VTE is not the fastest terminal library but has good Unicode support, and the documentation suggests turning off font anti-aliasing if rendering is slow. Version 1.2.0, released in March 2026, switched the build entirely to Meson.