What is the best alternative to Extraterm?

Question

Built By the Slant team

We find the best product for your budget

Our AI does all the product research work so you don’t have to.

Add to Chrome

Try it now

score 59 · Answer 1

Alacritty

Top Pro

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

Written in Rust with a philosophy focusing on speed and simplicity, Alacritty is one of the fastest terminal emulators out there. See More

Top Con

No text re-flow when window is resized

Latest versions not only perform re-flow, but it is done fast af. See More

Top Pro

Looks good

Alacritty looks very slick on Linux, especially with GNOME or i3. See More

Top Con

Cannot into ligatures

Alacritty not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive font options

Alacritty can be configured to adjust line spacing (height), letter spacing (width), and individual character horizontal/vertical positions. See More

Top Con

Sacrifices basic features for raw performance.

The Suzuki GSXR of terminals. Or your ditzy, blonde high school cheerleader; fast and pretty but not a lot going on under the hood. Eschews a negative developmental philosophy towards including said functionality, with the official reason cited in project documentation as "Not within the realm of a terminal emulator" and ostensibly, "best left up to other tools such as terminal multiplexers" [such as screen or tmux]. Which is unfortunate when you factor in speed against terminal with the functionality built in vs their reliance on 3rd party tools: tmux on alacritty: 'find /usr' time: 3.234s, cpu: 72% tmux on konsole: find /usr' time: 1.777s, cpu: 96% See issue here. See More

Top Pro

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

Specs

GPU:GPU accelerated rendering

Configurable:Easy AF, live-updating configuration (in YAML format)

See All Experiences

59 7

score 227 · Answer 2

KiTTY

Top Pro

Includes additional features over PuTTy

Sessions filter Shortcuts for pre-defined command The session launcher Automatic logon script URL hyperlinks Running a locally saved script on a remote session Send to tray Transparency Quick start of a duplicate session SSH Handler: Internet Explorer integration pscp.exe and WinSCP integration New command-line options See More

Top Con

No centralized configuration

Each session holds its own configuration of all features. This means that if one wants to change a configuration common to all sessions (say, the terminal font), it has to be changed in each stored session separately. A better solution would be to have a default configuration and store only the changed elements for each session (both configurations would be merged, with e priority on the specific one). See More

Top Pro

Source Code Available

Source code is available so you could modify or review changes. See More

Top Con

No tabbed sessions.

No built in support for tabbed sessions. Requires an add on. See More

Top Pro

Startup sessions

Support start-up sessions which allow you to specify the window/tab layout, working directories, and programs to run on startup. See More

Top Pro

Can store login credentials

Ability to store passwords/passphrases locally. See More

Top Pro

True Color support

Supports True Color, so software like Vim can display a really nice pallet. See More

Top Pro

Background image

Ability to overlay the terminal background with an image. See More

Top Pro

Auto login script

Automatic processing of commands after conncetion was made. See More

Top Pro

Unicode

Uses Unicode for the best character compatibility. See More

See All Experiences

227 44

score 63 · Answer 3

hyper

Top Con

Made with Electron

It uses a considerable amount of resources, compared to other offerings. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform due to electron browser-based foundation

Top Con

Incorrect rendering

Terminal window has visual artifacts. See More

Top Pro

Built on electron, supports split panels and plugins

Top Con

No configuration UI; all options must be set via JSON

Top Con

Still maturing as of December 2016

Folks noticed some issues in the 1.0 release cited here. See More

Top Con

Difficult to find information about it, because of the confusion with hyperterminal

See All Experiences

63 32

score 6 · Answer 4

FireCMD

Top Pro

Sophisticated auto-completion

FireCMD supports command auto-completion. Once you start typing a command, you can press the tab key to auto-complete it. See More

Top Con

Not free

Although there's a free trial available, FireCDM is not free and costs $29. See More

Top Pro

Recursive and persistent aliases

FireCMD allows users to create up to 500 aliases. See More

Top Pro

HTML and CSS support makes for greater usability

HTML is a very flexible and user-friendly language for writing web pages, while CSS allows for the content of a HTML document to be separated from the style and layout of that document. See More

Top Pro

A free trial is available

A free trial of FireCMD is available for users to try out. See More

6 0

score 5 · Answer 5

QTerminal

Top Pro

Font ligatures

QTerminal support font ligatures found in fonts like FiraCode. See More

Top Con

Window resize

Resizing the window does not resize the contents, like rxvt-unicode does. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Compared to many terminal emulators, QTerminal is lightweight with fewer dependencies than most. See More

Top Con

Strange default paste action

When pasting into QTerminal, one has to be careful as it assumes immediate execution. See More

5 0

score 22 · Answer 6

WinSSHTerm

Top Pro

Freeware

WinSSHTerm is free for anyone to use. See More

Top Con

Not a true terminal emulator

It's a PuTTY interface and it's mostly used to access remote machines through ssh, so it may not be very suitable for working on a local machine. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are especially valuable for professionals. See More

Top Pro

Supports X Server

There is easy, automatic integration with X Server and starts/stops can take place with the launch/exit of WinSSHTerm. See More

Top Pro

Supports file transfer

The user can start a WinSCP session inside WinSSHTerm, without the need to duplicate the session in WinSCP. See More

Top Pro

Highly portable

The user can run WinSSHTerm from a USB drive on different computers. See More

Top Pro

Ready for production use

There are no annoying bugs in WinSSHTerm. Navigation tools and keyboard shortcuts are a great time saver, especially if you have to manage multiple connections. See More

See All Experiences

22 2

score 100 · Answer 7

tmux

Top Pro

Easily split panes

There is a keyboard shortcut that makes it easy to split a window and create more panes. See More

Top Con

Poorly designed key binding

Counter-intuitive keyboard shortcuts make tmux very hard to use and learn. See More

Top Pro

Mouse support

Mouse support can optionally be enabled, allowing e.g. scrolling with the mouse wheel, or switching panes with mouse clicks. See More

Top Con

Bad scrolling support

Top Pro

Maximize screen space

As a tiling window manager, it'll make use of all the space. As you have multiple workspaces and you can resize, etc. you can adjust to see what matters most. See More

Top Con

No builtin telnet or serial support

It's considered bloat by the maintainers and for this reason there's no builtin support for them. See More

Top Pro

Windows linked to sessions

tmux calls the individual shell instances windows. They are displayed like tabs in the status line. These windows can be shared between different sessions, so that any given shell instance can be in any number of tmux sessions used for different purposes or by different users. This allows configurations like the following example: User A: wAB, wA1, wA2; User B: wB1, wAB, wB2 See More

Top Pro

Preserve the state

As long as you don't close your session, you may even lose your SSH connection, it'll keep your state just as it was. So you can resume where you left off (via tmux attach). See More

Top Pro

Frequently updated

Tmux is in a state of constant development. Updates are frequent and bug reports usually get an answer within days. See More

Top Pro

Only need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts and commands to make much headway

See All Experiences

100 7

score 32 · Answer 8

Tilda

Top Pro

Few dependencies

Tilda is a very minimal and lean terminal emulator. It requires very few dependencies and the amount of resources needed is small. See More

Top Con

Contains some annoying bugs

Tilda can be buggy at times. For example, if you don't close it before shutdown, it may prompt you to reconfigure it all over again on the next boot. See More

Top Pro

Easily accessible drop-down

The drop-down function in Tilda does not get in the way and can be accessed at any time with a keyboard shortcut. See More

Top Pro

Tabs support

Tilda supports tabs. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

There are tons of customizations you can make: from adding colors to text, turning backgrounds transparent, setting the size to be "maximized", toggling scrollbar on and off, adjusting orientation/borders/animation, etc. See More

Top Pro

Supports transparency

You can monitor information displayed by applications under Tilda. See More

32 3

score 15 · Answer 9

z/Scope Terminal Emulator

Top Pro

Supports tabs, making for easier navigation

z/Scope supports tabs and tab-based navigation. See More

Top Con

Not free

z/Scope is not free. See More

Top Pro

Affordable

Licenses are permanent. Price starts at $46. First year support is free. Continuing subscription, it's not mandatory to renew maintenance services. See More

Top Pro

Host Access

It supports IBM TN3270E / TN3270 emulation, IBM TN5250E, UNIX VT100-420, SSH and secure FTP integration. See More

Top Pro

Cross OS

Windows and Web-based editions. See More

15 2

score 2 · Answer 10

PromptPal

Top Con

Not free

Although there's a free trial available, PromptPal is not free to use. See More

Top Pro

Tabbed UI makes the user's life easier

You can have PromptPal open automatically with the same tabs as used in the most recent session, starting in the same directories. See More

Top Pro

Multiple shells supported

PromptPal supports several shells (including Powershell) and it allows you to choose which shell to run through the preferences. See More

Top Pro

Persistent, editable command history

You can mark most used commands in PromptPal as favourites. See More

2 0

score 2 · Answer 11

Fox Term

Top Pro

Multi-Terminal

Many terminals in one, save-able, restart-able, session. See More

Top Con

Dated

Hasn't been updated for a while, so your Windows will need legacy .NET runtime support. (Windows will automatically detect this and initiate the update, if needed) See More

Top Pro

Simple

Minimalist. All you need is to connect to a serial host. See More

2 0

score 14 · Answer 12

Windows Terminal

Top Pro

Is an actual terminal emulator--what a Linux user would expect--like xterm.

Not a command prompt/processor (i.e. shell) but a host for such applications. ANSI / Virtual Terminal sequences 24-bit Color Pseudoconsole ("ConPTY") See More

Top Con

Unstable and buggy

Sometimes freezes and/or crashes. See More

Top Pro

Official Microsoft Product

Top Con

Requires latest version of Windows 10

Top Pro

Open Source under the MIT License

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/ See More

Top Con

Configured via (mostly) documented json

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/doc/cascadia/SettingsSchema.md See More

Top Pro

Microsoft is nailing on its features

See All Experiences

14 2

score 29 · Answer 13

Sakura

Top Pro

Lightweight

Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources. See More

Top Con

Doesn't provide many configuration options

Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities. See More

Top Pro

Starts quickly even on lower-end machines

Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM). See More

Top Pro

Great unicode support

Even shows combining chars correctly. See More

Top Pro

Tab support

Top Pro

Easy zoom

Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+' to zoom in and Ctrl+'-' to zoom out). See More

Top Pro

True colour support

Supports full 24-bit color. See More

See All Experiences

29 4

score 6 · Answer 14

LilyTerm

Top Pro

Support for tabbing

You can also color and reorder tabs, as well as manipulate tabs through keybindings. See More

Top Con

Annoying behaviors

The default configuration may have some annoying behaviors (that can be removed by changing the default config). Such include asking for confirmation when reusing an existing window or when starting the terminal to launch a specific command. See More

Top Pro

Transparency support improves usability

LilyTerm has true transparency support, making for better GUI usability. See More

Top Pro

Change encoding on-the-fly

LilyTerm can change encoding on-the-fly. UTF-8 is the default encoding. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

LilyTerm is a terminal emulator that aims to be as lightweight as possible. It requires minimal system resources and has very few dependencies. See More

Top Pro

Fullscreen support

LilyTerm has fullscreen support which improves visibility. See More

6 1

score 16 · Answer 15

ROXTerm

Top Pro

Drag and drop

ROXTerm supports dragging and dropping items into the Terminal window. See More

Top Con

Uncertain future

The original developer, Tony Houghton, declared the death of Roxterm on 2016-05 at https://sourceforge.net/p/roxterm/discussion/422638/thread/60da6975/?limit=25#3fc9. In 2018, work began to resume on Github rather than Sourceforge (https://github.com/realh/roxterm/issues/1) but the future maintenance is uncertain. See More

Top Pro

Advanced D-Bus usage

In ROXTerm, users can use D-Bus to configure terminals from other applications, allowing for communication between multiple computer programs. See More

Top Con

Not for regular users

ROXTerm is made for power users who spend most of their time on the terminal. For a regular user using ROXTerm it would be an overkill. See More

Top Pro

Includes a configuration manager

ROXTerm includes a configuration manager which can easily be run by selecting Configure... in the terminal's menu, or by simply running roxterm-config. You can then easily swap configuration files with other users, manage profiles, and customize things like color schemes or keyboard shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Supports GTK3

ROXTerm uses the latest GTK widget set which is great a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. See More

16 3

score 77 · Answer 16

Xfce4 terminal

Top Pro

Good for systems with low specs

Like other applications included in the Xfce package, this terminal emulator is very lightweight and doesn't require many resources to run. This makes it perfect for systems that have low specs. See More

Top Con

Resizing text resizes window

Top Pro

Almost everything is customizable

You can configure size, color, background, etc. See More

Top Con

Cannot set text color for character under cursor to background color

Suppose you have a dark background with a light cursor and light foreground color: the light cursor will cover up whatever character it is on, so that you cannot read it. There is no option to set the foreground color for the character under the cursor to what is normally the background color. Such an option would allow you to read the character under the cursor. See More

Top Pro

Tabs support

Xfce4 fully supports tabs and tab-based navigation. See More

Top Con

Only one terminal per tab

Tabs only, no multiple splinted terminals in one window. See More

Top Pro

True transparency

You can set the transparency of the Xfce4 terminal on any amount you want, out of the box. See More

Top Con

Can't scroll on spamming text

When text generates too fast, you can't scroll it, so you just can't read anything in such moments. See More

Top Pro

Can be switched to a drop-down terminal

You can configure the Xfce-terminal to act as a dropdown terminal if you want, which makes for greater ease of use. See More

Top Con

Does not support sixel images

Top Pro

Composition effects

Xfce4 terminal takes advantage of xfce composition effects. See More

Top Con

No profiles

There's no profiles or profile-based customization in Xfce-terminal. See More

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Top Con

Execution in xfce4-terminal - e mode is not always functional

See All Experiences

77 11

score 91 · Answer 17

Guake

Top Pro

Extremely customizable

Guake's appearance is very customizable: from the transparency to the width and height of the window. You can also choose which key to use for toggling the terminal window. See More

Top Con

Not cross-platform

Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3. See More

Top Pro

Drop-down terminal

You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen. See More

Top Con

No font ligature

Guake uses vte for its terminal emulation, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it. He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not. See More

Top Pro

Supports transparency

Transparency is particularly useful for when you need to refer to the information displayed by application under Guake window. See More

Top Con

Not very responsive

Occasionally, Guake slows down and is not very responsive. See More

Top Pro

Hotkey support

Guake is very fast and easy to open with a customizable hotkey, meaning there's no fiddling with menus or icons. See More

Top Pro

Available in many popular distro repositories

Guake is available in a lot of repositories for the most popular distros. This makes it very easy to obtain and install on almost any system. See More

Top Pro

Tabs support

Guake supports tabs, while working with them is very easy. See More

Top Pro

Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle

The global shortcut key, F12, can be used to easily toggle the terminal window. See More

Top Pro

Can choose byobu as shell

You can choose byobu as shell, by adding a line to /etc/shells : " /usr/bin/byobu" and get guake with byobu ... sweet! See More

See All Experiences

91 13

score 34 · Answer 18

mintty

Top Pro

Support for Cygwin and MSYS

Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc. See More

Top Con

No multiple tab support

Top Pro

Proper support for scrolling in terminal applications

The mouse wheel in mintty actually scrolls the content in man/less/vim, etc. See More

Top Con

Win32 console API performs poorly

Classic Windows console applications don't work well. See More

Top Pro

Xterm-compatible terminal emulation

Xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. See More

Top Con

No native support for WSL

Cygwin is dead. WSL is amazing, yet Mintty is designed around Cygwin and the WSLtty app to connect Mintty to WSL feels like a hack. See More

Top Pro

UTF-8 support

UTF-8 allows for the encoding of all possible characters. See More

Top Pro

Drag and drop makes for ease of use

The drag and drop function in mintty allows the user to move an item quickly and easily. See More

See All Experiences

34 6

score 90 · Answer 19

st

Top Pro

Low memory usage

st is built to serve as a lightweight terminal emulator. It's very light and doesn't require many resources to run, making it able to run well on older and low-end machines. See More

Top Con

Configuration requires recompiling

Though recompilation takes seconds, knowledge of C header files is required for customization. See More

Top Pro

Extremely simple architecture

st consists of a single C file that takes seconds to recompile. This also makes it very easy to understand and customize. See More

Top Con

Crashes when some characters are displayed

Top Pro

24-bit "True Color" support

st supports color escape sequences for a full 16 million 24-bit color spectrum, instead of the typical 256 colors. See More

Top Con

No scrollback by default

The best way to perform scrollback is to use a multiplexer (such as tmux, screen, or dvtm) if you want scrollback and reverse-search support. See More

Top Pro

Support for fontconfig

There is full XFT (X Free Type interface library) and fallback font support through fontconfig in st. If your selected font is missing a certain glyph or symbol, but one of your other installed fonts has it, it will be shown. See More

Top Con

Text is cut off when resizing windows

When reducing windows, lines do not wrap, they are cut off. When the window is made large again, some of the text is missing. See More

Top Pro

Image previews

Handles image previews (e.g. in ranger) way better than other terminal emulators. See More

Top Con

New features means installing patches

Just to get copy/paste support and scrolling, you have to install patches. And it's not that intuitive for a beginner. See More

Top Pro

Copyfree licensing

Copyfree licensing implies that the user has the freedom to copy, use, modify, and distribute what he/she possesses. See More

Top Con

Imperfect fontconfig support for CJK characters

st doesn't seem to use CJK fonts provided by fontconfig while other programs use such fonts. See More

Top Pro

Patches are great

The patches on the site are great. Scroll back, hide the mouse, etc. See More

See All Experiences

90 13

score 55 · Answer 20

Terminology

Top Pro

Scalable fonts

Font size in Terminology automatically scales according to window size. When you resize the window, so does the text. See More

Top Con

Configuration is sometimes complicated and non-obvious

There's a "Settings" menu for configuration, but more options there would make it easier. Downloading themes and extensions from the official repo would be a big plus. See More

Top Pro

Looks smashing

Terminals are often very dull looks wise, not so with terminology. See More

Top Con

No True-Color support

Not able to display a modern full range of colors, yet. See More

Top Pro

In-terminal video, picture and thumbnail support

Thumbnails, pictures, and videos can all be rendered in-terminal, based on the directory listing or mouse interactions. For instance, using "ls" on a picture folder will produce a list of thumbnails instead of only the filenames. See More

Top Con

Scrollback is completely nroken

Scrolling back the emulator inserts random lines from other places in the scrollback buffer in between the actuall output lines. Thus it is impossible to see a correct copy of the previous output. See More

Top Pro

Splitable

You can split windows, like in terminator. See More

Top Con

No scrollbar

The lack of scrollbar in Terminology makes navigation difficult. But you can use keys for it. See More

Top Pro

Visually customizable

It is very customizable in every aspect of the visual options. See More

Top Con

Too many bells and whistles

Some people feel that Terminology has too many features that are not suited for a terminal, but for a window manager instead. For instance, viewing thumbnails, watching videos and gifs, and other similarly flashy things just feel like eye candy and should not be part of a terminal emulator. See More

Top Pro

Integrates well with Enlightenment WM

Terminology is part of the Enlightenment WM packages. As such, it integrates really well with Enlightenment and other tools in the package. See More

Top Pro

Block copy

You can copy text in blocks. See More

Top Pro

Copyfree licensing

Terminology uses the Simplified BSD License. As it is a copyfree license, it tends to minimize license incompatibilities, legal compliance requirements, and various other complexities that may make it difficult to understand certain licenses. See More

See All Experiences

55 10

What is the best alternative to Extraterm?

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

No text re-flow when window is resized

Looks good

Cannot into ligatures

Comprehensive font options

Sacrifices basic features for raw performance.

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

Includes additional features over PuTTy

No centralized configuration

Source Code Available

No tabbed sessions.

Startup sessions

Can store login credentials

True Color support

Background image

Auto login script

Unicode

Made with Electron

Cross-platform due to electron browser-based foundation

Incorrect rendering

Built on electron, supports split panels and plugins

No configuration UI; all options must be set via JSON

Still maturing as of December 2016

Difficult to find information about it, because of the confusion with hyperterminal

Sophisticated auto-completion

Not free

Recursive and persistent aliases

HTML and CSS support makes for greater usability

A free trial is available

Font ligatures

Window resize

Lightweight

Strange default paste action

Freeware

Not a true terminal emulator

Keyboard shortcuts

Supports X Server

Supports file transfer

Highly portable

Ready for production use

Easily split panes

Poorly designed key binding

Mouse support

Bad scrolling support

Maximize screen space

No builtin telnet or serial support

Windows linked to sessions

Preserve the state

Frequently updated

Only need to learn a few keyboard shortcuts and commands to make much headway

Few dependencies

Contains some annoying bugs

Easily accessible drop-down

Tabs support

Highly customizable

Supports transparency

Supports tabs, making for easier navigation

Not free

Affordable

Host Access

Cross OS

Not free

Tabbed UI makes the user's life easier

Multiple shells supported

Persistent, editable command history

Multi-Terminal

Dated

Simple

Is an *actual* terminal emulator--what a Linux user would expect--like xterm.

Unstable and buggy

Official Microsoft Product

Requires latest version of Windows 10

Open Source under the MIT License

Configured via (mostly) documented json

Microsoft is nailing on its features

Lightweight

Doesn't provide many configuration options

Starts quickly even on lower-end machines

Great unicode support

Is an actual terminal emulator--what a Linux user would expect--like xterm.