What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

Question

44

Options
Considered

1.9K

User
Recs.

Aug 7, 2020

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 4 of 41 OptionsWhy?

Best Linux terminal emulators	Price	GPU	Configurable
93 Xfce4 terminal	-	-	-
92 rxvt-unicode	-	-	-
90 Termite	-	-	-
90 Alacritty	0	GPU accelerated rendering	Easy AF, live-updating configuration (in YAML format)
89 Guake	-	-	-

See Full List

rxvt-unicode

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

Cannot into ligatures

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

WorthyAjatar's Experience

The fastest terminal emulator I have ever used. See More

Specs

GPU:GPU accelerated rendering

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

Top Pro

Looks good

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

firebird's Experience

i found that's fast and clear with big window See More

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

Maxwell Anderson's Experience

Alacritty is FAST. It takes almost no time to launch the first time or ever while other terminal emulators I've used are slower in this regard. Alacritty also performs operations more quickly and smoothly than other terminal emulators. See More

FriendlyWagyl's Experience

This terminal is GPU Accelerated and therefore it is super smooth. See More

HonorableAlkonost's Experience

Ridiculously fast and simple. Who needs ligatures? But support for ligatures is coming. See More

See All

37 Other Options Considered

Guake

Top Pro

Clean

Rwithik Manoj's Experience

st is a See More

Top Pro

Minimalist

Hackable and lightweight. See More

See All

kitty

Top Pro

Designed for Powerusers

Is keyboard focused, easily hackable, and minimal. Does one thing and does it well. See More

ReceptiveHeXiangu's Experience

Top Pro

Multiple terminal panes to suit user's needs

It is possible to split the terminal window into several areas and you can re-size them as needed. Multiple windows and tabs are also supported. See More

Top Con

Heavyweight

Due to its many features, Terminator can be a bit heavyweight and with lots of dependencies. This makes it unsuitable for old machines or computers with low resources. See More

Janaka Bandara's Experience

Top Pro

Supports split-view

Konsole supports split-view which splits the window into two (or more) konsole instances. This is very useful for people who work a lot on the terminal and don't want to spend time navigating between different windows or tabs. See More

Top Con

KDE Library dependencies

See All

Terminology

Multiple terminals are managed from one gnome-terminal instance that takes up about 45 MB. Adding on other instances (with 10k lines of used buffer), each terminal requires about 16 MB of memory. See More

Top Pro

Transparency

We can change the alpha canal and see through the terminal See More

Top Pro

Notifications upon command completion

This isn't in the current release but in development versions you get notifications when commands are complete. This is great for long-running commands, relieving you from continuously checking to see if your command is done. See More

See All

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

SharpManat's Experience

Top Pro

Lightweight

Xterm is a very lightweight terminal. It requires few resources, allowing it to run well even on lower-end machines. See More

Top Con

Historical source code

The stories behind terminal emulation beyond their classical representatives (of which xterm is simply the most long-lived) are somewhere inbetween subtly irritating to downright surreal. See More

I.M. Rowse's Experience

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 Con

Not maintained

Tilda is not maintained anymore. See More

DevotedIkuTurso's Experience

There is a RAM leak when using the Pantheon Terminal that adds up over time and use. See More

Top Pro

Smart copy and paste

The keyboard shortcut for copy + paste is intelligently adapted andnbased on text selection and clipboard state. This makes it possible to use standard copy + paste shortcuts without colliding with standard ctrl + c behavior in the Terminal. See More

Top Con

Incompatible with LTS Ubuntu

Pantheon is developed and binaries are released for a near blessing edge operating system (elementary OS). As such, installing it on an LTS Ubuntu system may be nearly impossible without replacing a large portion of the LTS stack that Ubuntu-targeted software expects. See More

Top Pro

Search feature

Top Con

Restrictive license

See All

cool-retro-term

Top Pro

Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens

Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel. See More

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

v3ree's Experience

Xfce4 terminal

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The Best 4 of 41 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

Good for systems with low specs

Only one terminal per tab

True transparency

No profiles

Tabs support

Can't scroll on spamming text

Almost everything is customizable

Does not support sixel images

Composition effects

Resizing text resizes window

Can be switched to a drop-down terminal

Cannot set text color for character under cursor to background color

Fast rendering

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

Customizable key bindings

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

Low memory usage

Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped

Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

Requires work to look acceptable

Fast text rendering

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Supports terminal transparency

Unicode rendering is buggy

Unicode support

Bloated

High performance

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Supports multiple font types

In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

Requires work to configure useful functionality (clickable URL's, font scaling, tabs)

Handles bold text colour properly

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

Built-in Perl interpreter

No way to change font size with a hotkey/scale event

Proper wrapping support

My Recommendation for Termite

My Recommendation for Termite

Minimal terminal emulator

Cannot set specific parameters through CLI arguments

Works great with a tiling window manager

Difficult to install in some distros

Vim-like behavior

Problem correctly displaying images while using compton

24-bit "True Color" support

Can't change keybinding

Simple configuration

Limited documentation

Simple font resizing

Bad URL matching

Fontconfig support

Doesn't support ligatures

Slow text rendering

My Recommendation for Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

Cannot into ligatures

Looks good

No text re-flow when window is resized

Comprehensive font options

Sacrifices basic features for raw performance.

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

Simple configuration

37 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Guake

My Recommendation for Guake

Drop-down terminal

Not very responsive

Extremely customizable

Not cross-platform

Available in many popular distro repositories

No font ligature

Supports transparency

Hotkey support

Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle