What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.

score 164 · Accepted Answer

rxvt-unicode

Add Video or Image

Top Pro

Low memory usage

Rxvt-unicode uses very little memory and takes a lightweight approach without losing many important functionalities. A single instance of urxvt takes about 6.5MB-8MB of RAM. See More

Top Con

Requires work to look acceptable

Out of the box, rxvt-unicode is not too pleasant to look at. Some understanding of Xresources is required for updating its appearance. That being said, the experience of customizing it can be very rewarding. See More

ResponsiblePistis's Experience

I love this terminal. I've used many terminals over the years, and I always come back to a few. "Whatever is already installed on the distro I'm using at the moment." simply because it's already there. "st", because even though you have to compile it to configure it, I believe in the suckless.org projects and feel like the single small source file C program is very nice "rxvt-unicode" because it seems to be the best. See More

Top Pro

Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

For those who want to lower their system's resource usage, rxvt-unicode allows for daemonization. This way you can run several instances of urxvt inside a single process. See More

Top Con

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Though this is still not available, you can download the patched version for 24bit, here. See More

cosmo's Experience

It's light, simple, reliable, and it stays out of your way. It's also incredibly customizable. It's the way a terminal should be. See More

Top Pro

Fast text rendering

Rxvt-unicode has very fast text rendering, being able to render hundreds of MB of text in a very short time. See More

Top Con

Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped

If a character in a backup font is wider than the base font, urxvt substitutes the non-displayable character. A large letter space will show the wide characters, but the result is not reasonably spaced. There is a patch from 2014 that the urxvt maintainer will not merge. See More

SharpPostverta's Experience

Although I want better fallback fonts (and no font clipping where it can be helped) and 24-BIT TRUE COLOR SUPPORT (cough), I think urxvt is a great terminal, and I use it every day. See More

Top Pro

Supports multiple font types

Multiple font types can be displayed flawlessly in rxvt-unicode. See More

Top Con

In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Because of sharing the same process terminal windows cannot be killed without sacrificing all other open windows. That becomes even more dangerous if you use multiple graphical managers without overriding socket with RXVT_SOCKET. See More

Brenton Horne's Experience

Was challenging to figure out how to configure it to my liking, but I eventually found a configuration that worked for me. I'm not sure if it uses less RAM than XTerm, in fact based on ps_mem tests I've done XTerm sometimes outperforms urxvt and vice-versa. Personally, I do not think it has any real significant advantages over XTerm, unless you're a Perl programmer, but nor is it any worse than XTerm. The only, fair insignificant advantage that urxvt has, is it is in the repos of Solus, a distro without XTerm in its repos. Although, both terminal emulators are in the official repos of almost every other popular distro. See More

Top Pro

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

Top Con

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

IntuitiveMacGreine's Experience

So light! See More

Top Pro

Supports terminal transparency

Changing the transparency of the terminal is allowed for in rxvt-unicode. This not only makes for eye candy but is also good for GUI usability. See More

Top Con

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

While you can choose the color of the cursor and the character under the cursor, there's no automatic "reverse color" for the cursor. This makes it impossible to use rxvt-unicode if you have a light background terminal and a dark background editor. See More

Top Pro

High performance

Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives. See More

Top Con

Unicode rendering is buggy

There are a few references to urxvt's buggy rendering, such as unicode combining characters, which bled through during scrolling. See More

Top Pro

Unicode support

International language support is provided through Unicode. See More

Top Con

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Sometimes you may need to enlarge the font to improve readability, or shrink it to have more real estate and "hawk's eye" view of data. In rxvt you need to change the configuration file or use these commands: $ function fontsize {printf '\33]50;%s%d\007' "xft:Dejavu Sans Mono:size=$1::antialias=false"} $ fontsize 22 See More

Top Pro

Built-in Perl interpreter

It has a built-in Perl interpreter, meaning that no install is needed. Simply run urxvtperl. See More

Top Con

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

Top Pro

Handles bold text colour properly

Top Pro

Proper wrapping support

During selection and pasting wrapped text doesn't break into lines at place of wrapping. See More

See All

The Best 3 of 39 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

My Recommendation for rxvt-unicode

Low memory usage

Requires work to look acceptable

Can be daemonized to reduce resource usage

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Fast text rendering

Unicode characters that are too wide are blanked instead of clipped

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)

Supports terminal transparency

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

High performance

Unicode rendering is buggy

Unicode support

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Built-in Perl interpreter

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

Handles bold text colour properly

Proper wrapping support

My Recommendation for Terminology

My Recommendation for Terminology

Scalable fonts

Configuration is sometimes complicated and non-obvious

Looks smashing

No True-Color support

In-terminal video, picture and thumbnail support

No scrollbar

Splitable

Too many bells and whistles

Visually customizable

Integrates well with Enlightenment WM

Block copy

Copyfree licensing

My Recommendation for Termite

My Recommendation for Termite

Minimal terminal emulator

Difficult to install in some distros

Vim-like behavior

Can't change keybinding

Works great with a tiling window manager

Cannot set specific parameters through CLI arguments

Simple configuration

Limited documentation

24-bit "True Color" support

Bad URL matching

Fontconfig support

Problem correctly displaying images while using compton

Simple font resizing

Slow text rendering

36 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

My Recommendation for Xfce4 terminal

Good for systems with low specs

Resizing text resizes window

Tabs support

Cannot set text color for character under cursor to background color

True transparency

Only one terminal per tab

Almost everything is customizable

Can't scroll on spamming text

Can be switched to a drop-down terminal

No profiles

Composition effects

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

Customizable key bindings

Fast rendering

My Recommendation for Terminator

My Recommendation for Terminator

Highly customizable

Heavyweight

Multiple terminal panes to suit user's needs

Poor text search

Can type on multiple grouped terminals simultaneously

Starting up can be slow

Extendable functionality through plugins

Buggy and crashy