What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?

Question

DevelopmentUtilitiesOSXProductivity

What are the best terminal emulators for Mac?

18

Options
Considered

815

User
Recs.

Feb 7, 2024

Last
Updated

The Best 1 of 16 OptionsWhy?

Best terminal emulators for Mac	Price	Supported platforms	Ligature support
91 iTerm2	-	macOS	Yes
61 ZOC	-	-	-
59 Terminal.app	-	-	-
-- kitty	FREE	-	-
53 Alacritty	0	-	-

See Full List

15 Other Options Considered

ZOC

Top Pro

Adds some old emulations that are otherwise not available on macOS

E.g. Wyse, Televideo or IBM 5250. See More

Top Con

Not free

Requires a commercial license to use. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Originally developed for OS/2 (as Zap-O-Comm), ZOC is currently available for Windows and Macintosh. See More

Top Pro

Scriptable

Provides complete automation of the client using its macro scripting. See More

Top Pro

Hide-able UI

ZOC allows every UI component except the title bar to be hidden. All features are accessible through the context menu. See More

Top Pro

Content re-flow when window is resized

When window is resized, content is rearranged as if it was received in a window of that size. See More

Top Pro

Can view and send to all sessions at once

Offers a thumbnail view of all session in thumbnails and type commands to all sessions at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Supports serial and dial-up connections

In addition to telnet, ssh and rlogin, ZOC supports direct serial connections, modem dialing, and named pipes. See More

Top Pro

Tabbed sessions

Multiple sessions in tabs. Thumbnail overview. Tabs can be torn off into new windows. See More

See All

Terminal.app

Top Pro

Default terminal on Mac

Since it is already installed by default, you don't need to worry about finding and installing another terminal. See More

Top Con

Updates are released rarely

Terminal usually gets an update when any new MacOS version is released, which is every couple of years. See More

LearnedOkuninushi's Experience

The tab names never stick, and for me that i like a windows with many terminal tabs it's imperative that should work! See More

Top Pro

Light on System Resources

Terminal.app lighter uses less system resources than iTerm having the same number of windows, tabs and processes going on. See More

Top Con

Tab names are volatile

The tab names never stick -- it's imperative that this should work. See More

IndependentMelqart's Experience

If it ain't broke... See More

Top Pro

Great compatibility

Works with everything. See More

Top Con

Background images are stretched rather than clipped

Julian Pereira's Experience

The terminal.app is relatively a great terminal emulator. Since it comes as standard with MacOS, it negates the need to download or install a separate one. For those who are looking for a great terminal, this it. In addition, it uses the least amount of resources compared with the other terminal emulators. See More

Top Pro

Easily open man pages

By right clicking on a highlighted string you can easily search through the man pages for that string and the man page will open in a nice pop up window. See More

Top Con

Occasionally crashes

Working remotely with a full buffer may cause complete terminal app crash. See More

Top Pro

Excellent xterm emulation support

Top Con

Home and End keys require shift being pressed

Top Pro

Beautiful

Terminal has nice colors and font options. See More

See All

kitty

Top Pro

Supports all modern terminal features

Kitty supports graphics (images), unicode, true-color, OpenType ligatures, mouse protocol, focus tracking, bracketed paste and several new terminal protocol extensions. See More

Top Con

Does not support background images

cosmo's Experience

This thing is FAST, man. I've never had a terminal feel so responsive. Not only that, this thing is loaded with customization options and plugins (adorably called "kittens"). I highly recommend this to anybody looking for a solid, performant, state-of-the-art terminal emulator. See More

Top Pro

Offloads rendering to the GPU

GPU rendering facilitates lower system load and buttery smooth scrolling. See More

Top Con

Does not support bright colors for bold text.

Dev absolutely refuses to implement. See More

PersonableEileithyia's Experience

love it - simple config file, lots of features and no problems See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast

Top Con

Does not support dynamic reload of configuration

You can update some things such as colors as long as terminal is in 'remote control' mode, but the majority of configuration options cannot be reloaded until it has been killed and restarted fresh See More

ExcellentApep's Experience

good See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Kitty works on Linux and macOS, and because it uses only OpenGL for rendering, it's trivial to port to other Unix-like platforms. See More

ThoughtfulNona's Experience

It seemed very promising until I discovered it does not obey terminal standards for the coloring of bold text. See More

Top Pro

Supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side

There's no need for additional applications like tmux! See More

Top Pro

Can be controlled from scripts or the shell prompt

This even works over SSH! See More

Top Pro

Great Config File

Configuration file has comments which make it easy to edit. See More

Top Pro

Extensible Kitten framework

Supports plugins to add features one at a time for those who need them. Examples include Unicode input and side-by-side diffs. See More

Top Pro

Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself

No graphical menus to clutter the screen saves system resources and time once you learn that all those options are still available from the command line within the app. See More

Top Pro

Window tiling

Very elegant keyboard shortcuts for creating and navigating between tiled terminals within each tab with no appreciable lag. See More

Top Pro

Scrollback buffer viewer

Allows for viewing the scrollback buffer in an external pager of your choice ('less' by default, with support for 'more' and 'most'), a huge benefit for turning actions taken in a live terminal session into a script for efficiency or dissemination or collaborating on workflows. See More

Top Pro

Tabs for multiple instances

Operate several terminals from one window using the tabs feature, allowing you to make simultaneous connections to different remote hosts. See More

Top Pro

Supports startup sessions

Startup sessions allow you to specify the window/tab layout, working directories, and programs to run on startup. See More

Top Pro

Unabridged configuration options

Kitty is fully configurable by an unabridged and readable configuration file. See More

See All

Alacritty

Top Pro

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-acceleration

Top Con

Cannot into ligatures

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

Nick May's Experience

Cannot support option as meta on MacOS see Alacritty issue #62 See More

Specs

Font Ligatures:No

Configurable:Yes, via automatically reloading YAML configuration file

GPU Acceleration:Yes

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

One-trick pony

It's fast, but then there's not much else there to see. See More

ExcitedErato's Experience

simple configuration. does everything it needs to... except launch on osx See More

Top Pro

Cross Platform

Supports macOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows. Configuration can be platform agnostic allowing identical configuration across systems. 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

PrudentQetesh's Experience

Lacks depth. See More

Top Pro

Simple configuration

The configuration file is very well made and easy to use. You can fine tune your preferences to perfection in a matter of minutes. See More

Top Con

Text reflows

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

No GUI for configuration

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

See All

Hyper

Top Con

Limited set of features out of the box

Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. Yet, taking the other listed con of immature plugin ecosystem into account, this leads to either living without the feature or using an unstable plugin. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful

HonorableSamas's Experience

beautiful, customizable, and great See More

Top Con

Can be slow

Example benchmark against iTerm in this Youtube video. See More

Top Pro

Great community support, extensions etc

InsightfulEnmesarra's Experience

Customizable as f**k ! See More

Top Con

Immature plugin ecosystem

Very often you'll find features behaving unexpectedly after installing plugins. Even the popular ones. See More

Top Pro

Fully customizable

If you are familiar with web standards, you will be at home in this terminal. See More

PersonableAres's Experience

lot of craches See More

Top Con

CJK languages not working

Top Pro

Limited set of features out of the box

Very few features are built into the product itself as the intention is for the plugins to provide most of them. If a plugin doesn't exist just as you like, write it. That extensibility, folks. See More

Top Con

Needs an account to work and sends your commands to some server

Apart from the security implications this is slowing things down, making it sometimes unusable! See More

See All

cool-retro-term

Top Con

Extremely heavy and impactful on resources

A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use. See More

Top Pro

A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display

Retro style. See More

Top Con

Not very practical by today's standards

While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Free to use and contribute to. See More

Top Con

Limited input customisation

No options for hotkeys or font customizations. See More

See All

Warp

Top Con

Needs an account to use

You have to create and account and sign in before you can use the terminal. See More

WezTerm

Top Pro

Open source and free

Top Con

Configuration can be a little non-intuitive

PersonableEileithyia's Experience

Love the lua config, but it is not my first choice in terminal emulators See More

Specs

Font Ligatures:Yes, with control over shaping and stylistic sets

Configurable:Lua based live reloading configuration

GPU Acceleration:Yes

Top Pro

Supports multiple windows, tabs, splits/panes

Tmux-like functionality with native UI even on Windows systems allows managing multiple terminal sessions how you like. See More

Top Con

Always opens new tabs in the current working directory of the previous one

This is annoying. When opening a new tab, it will always be opened in the working directory of the current tab. This is confusing. See More

Top Pro

Configuration in LUA

If you are familiar with programming or even better with lua, you'll love this feature! See More

Top Pro

Supports font ligatures and stylistic sets

Ships with JetBrains Mono, a modern programmers font, so that you can enjoy modern typographical features such as contextual ligatures and font variations/stylistic sets in your terminal environment. See More

Top Pro

Looks good

Highly customizable appearance and comes with over 240 built-in color schemes. See More

See All

Rio Terminal

Top Con

Can't choose font weight of a custom font yet

You can't choose font weight of a custom font See More

Top Pro

Best minimal tabs

They are as minimal as they can be You don't need info on tabs they are just tabs, which shell or where am i doesn't give me any context for so why show this info? See More

EagerGangrimDoryeong's Experience

Rio is really fast, I was using Kitty for many years but after test Rio I decided to stay with it. The only small problem is that a very fresh terminal so features are still coming compared to Kitty that has been here for while, but in terms of performance is way better than Kitty. See More

StrongIzanagi's Experience

Rio is really fast compared to iTerm2 that I used for many years See More

See All

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iTerm2

Top Pro

Extremely customizable

Other than being able to customize the various shortcuts, iTerm2 also lets you customize the colorscheme, font, transparency, etc. See More

Top Con

Keycodes are not passed through following Linux standards

If you come from a Linux terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal, Konsole...) and you rely on key-combos that are widely supported in those, porting the same functionality to iTerm is possible but will require a lot of research and configuration on your part, so account for a long painful adoption period. See More

CredibleThanatos's Experience

So regardless having all those options, iTerm2 still is the best option by far. There's Terminator too, but the GTK window decorator stinks when using it on Mac OS - BrunoFunnie :P See More

Specs

Supported platforms:macOS

Ligature support:Yes

Top Pro

Autocomplete is built-in

iTerm has autocomplete features built in. It remembers your past commands and when you are writing something on the terminal, simply pressing Control-; it will show you a drop down menu of suggestions from which to choose. See More

Top Con

Not quite as fast as Alacritty or Kitty

Comparing these 3 terminals on the same machine/config, iTerm stands out as the slowest of the bunch. The difference may not be noticeable to all users. See More

ExcellentApep's Experience

best terminal on mac See More

Top Pro

Complete out of the box

Unlike most terminal emulators, iTerm2 comes with a pretty complete set of features. It has built-in search, autocompletion, tabbed navigation, Growl support and even a built-in clipboard manager for various API keys and such. See More

Top Con

Way too many menu items and settings

Finding the right one is like searching for a needle in a haystack. See More

RobustBabi's Experience

iTerm is so good that it was one of the main reasons why I switched to Mac back in the day. I was using a Linux desktop, but working side-by-side with developers who had Mac, I was really missing the superior user experience they were enjoying. iTerm is always the very first application I install on every new Mac. See More

Top Pro

Fine tuning for fonts

It's possible to choose a font and adjust vertical and horizontal spacing. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Some people still use Snow Leopard or other 32-bit systems. See More

Top Pro

Can immediately open files inside a text editor

You can Ctrl+Click on a file path to open said file in a text editor. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support RTL

Top Pro

Supports mouse actions

Has support for mouse actions like clicking, dragging, selecting, etc. See More

Top Pro

Active maintainers

Issues resolved fast by quality contributors. See More

Top Pro

Works well with powerline fonts

Top Pro

Completely free and open source

iTerm2 is completely free and open source. It's released under the GPLv2 license. See More

Top Pro

Split panes

Easy to split panes to either horizontal or vertical sections. Makes it easy to observe multiple console windows. See More

Top Pro

Supported by many applications as a terminal app selection

If an application has terminal integration, there is high probability it allows iTerm2 to be selected. See More

Top Pro

Cmd+Shift+I to Input all

Wanna SSH your server from multiple tabs, here you go. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive

Top Pro

You only need to type in commands once

iTerm2 can store up to 4M of history of commands you already used. This, coupled with the built-in search features makes it possible to type a command only once and then search for it through the history for subsequent uses. See More

Top Pro

Works perfect with Oh My Zsh

It's a perfect base to add Oh My Zsh on top of it and enjoy a lot of themes and a really pleasant look and feel. See More

Top Pro

Works well with tmux

The great mouse and clipboard support that are built-in go really well with tmux. See More

Top Pro

Any key can be mapped to any function

Using the Preferences Menu you can set up hotkeys to map virtually any action you can think of to a single key or a combination of them. This is extremely helpful as it allows you to use shortcuts to edit commands you are typing in the terminal and while most terminal emulators have shortcuts for this sort of thing, few of them let you define your own. See More

Top Pro

GPU-rendered, blazing fast and super smooth

Many people say they use Kitty or Alacritty because they are GPU-rendered. That was true a long time ago. But iTerm2 has been GPU rendered for years now. It's so fast and smooth that you soon forget you are in a terminal. See More

Top Pro

Beautiful, minimalistic and elegant UI

It's super-clean and during use it gets completely out of the way, it's a beautiful canvas for your terminal work, a pure joy that never gets old. See More

The Best 1 of 16 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for iTerm2

My Recommendation for iTerm2

Extremely customizable

Keycodes are not passed through following Linux standards

Autocomplete is built-in

Not quite as fast as Alacritty or Kitty

Complete out of the box

Way too many menu items and settings

Fine tuning for fonts

Doesn't support Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Can immediately open files inside a text editor

Doesn't support RTL

Supports mouse actions

Active maintainers

Works well with powerline fonts

Completely free and open source

Split panes

Supported by many applications as a terminal app selection

Cmd+Shift+I to Input all

Intuitive

You only need to type in commands once

Works perfect with Oh My Zsh

Works well with tmux

Any key can be mapped to any function

GPU-rendered, blazing fast and super smooth

Beautiful, minimalistic and elegant UI

Can be configured as a drop-down terminal

Cmd+D to split plane vertically

15 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for ZOC

My Recommendation for ZOC

Adds some old emulations that are otherwise not available on macOS

Not free

Cross-platform

Scriptable

Hide-able UI

Content re-flow when window is resized

Can view and send to all sessions at once

Supports serial and dial-up connections

Tabbed sessions

My Recommendation for Terminal.app

My Recommendation for Terminal.app

Default terminal on Mac

Updates are released rarely

Light on System Resources

Tab names are volatile

Great compatibility

Background images are stretched rather than clipped

Easily open man pages

Occasionally crashes

Excellent xterm emulation support

Home and End keys require shift being pressed

Beautiful

My Recommendation for kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

Supports all modern terminal features

Does not support background images

Offloads rendering to the GPU

Does not support bright colors for bold text.

Extremely fast

Does not support dynamic reload of configuration

Cross-platform

Supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side

Can be controlled from scripts or the shell prompt

Great Config File

Extensible Kitten framework

Controlled and configured from the shell prompt within the program itself

Window tiling

Scrollback buffer viewer

Tabs for multiple instances

Supports startup sessions

Unabridged configuration options

My Recommendation for Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-acceleration

Cannot into ligatures

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

One-trick pony

Cross Platform