Terminal emulators

Blink Shell

Terminal for iPhone and iPad built around Mosh and SSH, with hterm rendering, extensive hardware keyboard support and a small local shell.

iSH

iOS app that runs an Alpine Linux shell locally by emulating x86 in user mode and translating Linux system calls.

QTerminal

LXQt's Qt terminal built on QTermWidget, with tabs, split views, a drop-down mode and a bookmarks pane for saved commands.

mux

Xfce Terminal

The Xfce desktop's GTK and VTE terminal, with tabs, a built-in drop-down mode, Sixel images and settings stored in Xfconf.

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Tilda

Drop-down terminal for Xorg desktops written in C with GTK and VTE, with tabs and per-instance hotkeys and config files.

ConEmu

Windows console emulator that hosts console programs in one tabbed GUI window, with splits, a quake-style mode and Far Manager integration.

mux

electerm

Electron terminal and remote-access client with local shells, SSH, SFTP, FTP, Telnet, serial, RDP and VNC sessions, split layouts and bookmark sync.

mux · ligatures · images

WindTerm

SSH, Telnet, serial and local shell client for Windows, macOS and Linux with tabs, split views, SFTP and tmux integration; only partly open source.

mux

Yakuake

Drop-down terminal for KDE Plasma that embeds Konsole's terminal component and adds tabs, splits, skins and a D-Bus interface.

mux · ligatures · images

cmux

macOS terminal built on libghostty with vertical tabs, splits, agent notifications and a scriptable browser pane for running AI coding agents.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Terminal.app

The terminal emulator bundled with macOS, with tabs, profiles, window groups and AppleScript support.

Extraterm

Terminal emulator in TypeScript on Qt and Node.js with framed command output, inline images, a command palette and extensions.

mux · ligatures · images

Zutty

X11 terminal emulator that renders its character grid with an OpenGL ES 3.1 compute shader, aimed at low-end hardware and accurate VT emulation.

gpu

mintty

Terminal emulator for Cygwin, MSYS2 and WSL on Windows, derived from PuTTY, with xterm-compatible emulation, Sixel and image support.

ligatures · images

Unicode fork of the rxvt X11 terminal emulator with a daemon/client mode, Xft font support and Perl extensions.

Guake

Drop-down terminal for GNOME and other Linux desktops, written in Python with GTK 3 and VTE, toggled with a hotkey.

mux

Termux

Android terminal emulator and Linux environment that installs packages through its own apt repository, no root required.

Black Box

GTK 4 terminal for GNOME written in Vala on VTE, with Tilix-compatible color schemes, a hideable header bar and optional Sixel support.

mux · images

GNOME Console

Simple GTK 4 terminal from the GNOME project (also called kgx), built on VTE and aimed at casual command-line use.

mux

Ptyxis

GTK 4 terminal for GNOME built on VTE, with automatic discovery of Podman, Toolbox and Distrobox containers alongside the host shell.

mux

Wave

Open-source terminal that lays out shells, file previews, an editor, web pages and AI chat as blocks in one window.

gpu · ligatures · images

cool-retro-term

Terminal emulator mimicking old cathode displays

Tilix

Tiling terminal emulator for Linux using GTK+3

mux

cmder

Portable console emulator for Windows with Unix tools

Warp

Terminal written in Rust with an IDE-style command editor, command output grouped into blocks, and built-in AI agents.

gpu · ligatures

Tabby

Cross-platform Electron terminal with a built-in SSH, Telnet and serial client, saved connection profiles and a plugin system.

mux · ligatures · images

Ghostty

Terminal emulator written in Zig with GPU rendering and a native UI on each platform: Swift/AppKit on macOS, GTK on Linux.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Kitty

GPU-rendered terminal written in C and Python, with its own graphics protocol, built-in tabs and splits, and scriptable 'kittens'.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Rio

GPU terminal emulator written in Rust that renders through WebGPU, with tabs and Sixel and iTerm2 image support.

gpu · ligatures · images

foot

Lightweight Wayland-native terminal emulator with a server/client mode, Sixel support and few dependencies.

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st

Simple, minimalist terminal implementation from suckless.org, configured through source code patches.

GNOME Terminal

GNOME's long-standing terminal emulator, built on VTE, with profiles and tabs.

xterm

The classic X Window System terminal emulator, the standard against which others are measured.

Terminator

Python/GTK terminal emulator for arranging several terminals in a grid of split panes within one window.

mux

Konsole

KDE's terminal emulator, with tabs, split views, profiles, bookmarks and Plasma desktop integration.

mux · ligatures · images

iTerm2

macOS terminal with split panes, tmux integration, search, triggers and a Python scripting API.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Hyper

Electron terminal built on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, themed and extended through npm plugins.

mux · ligatures · images

Windows Terminal

Microsoft's terminal for Windows that hosts PowerShell, cmd and WSL shells in tabs and panes, with GPU text rendering and JSON settings.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Contour

GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in C++ that focuses on VT conformance, with Sixel graphics, ligatures and a vi-like input mode.

gpu · ligatures · images

WezTerm

A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written in Rust. Features tabs, splits, ligatures, and extensive Lua configuration.

gpu · mux · ligatures · images

Alacritty

Cross-platform OpenGL terminal emulator written in Rust, configured with a TOML file and leaving tabs and splits to a multiplexer like tmux.

gpu