What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

Question

49

Options
Considered

2.5K

User
Recs.

Jan 28, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 2 of 41 OptionsWhy?

Best Linux terminal emulators	Price	Font Ligatures	Configurable
92 rxvt-unicode	-	-	-
91 kitty	-	-	-
89 Alacritty	-	No	Yes, via automatically reloading YAML configuration file
89 st	-	-	-
88 Terminator	-	-	-

See Full List

kitty

Top Pro

High-performance

Minimal perceived latency while typing, faster than most terminals. See More

Top Con

Very unique support issue with SSH

Kitty has SSH compatibility issues no other terminal I know of has. For every server Kitty NEEDS ncurses and python to be installed on that server or use a hack command in order for it to function. Kitty SSH, because kitty can not run on regular SSH, does not function otherwise. See More

PioneeringCicholGricenchos's Experience

Fast, image preview out of the box, and ligatures. Can handle 99% of the fonts out there. See More

Top Pro

True Color support

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

Top Con

Depends on Python

Fast but definitely not lightweight. See More

DeliberateTaneRore's Experience

Turn off IME by default. Can't re-enable by a parameter option, but must be set with the system-level ENV. Italics in many fonts are cut off. See More

Top Pro

OpenGL for rendering

Offloads rendering work to the GPU for lower system load. See More

Top Con

Everything has to be done via the keyboard

There's no preferences window for even the most basic settings and there's no right-click context menu. See More

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

Supports font ligatures

Properly renders font ligatures in fonts like Fira Code or Hasklig See More

Top Con

Minority issues will not be dealt with

Turns off IME by default. Can't re-enable by a parameter option, but must be set with the system-level ENV. Italics in many fonts are cut off. And also CJK fallback font rendering sucks. See More

CoherentKekui's Experience

feels fast / responsive / modern. had problems with urxvt before See More

Top Pro

Tries to move the state of terminal emulation forward

Adds protocol extensions for things like enhanced keyboard support, colored and styled underlines, graphics rendering, etc. See More

Top Con

Still new

Has no packages for a lot of main distros. See More

RobustTiamat's Experience

Glitchy See More

Top Pro

Designed for Powerusers

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

Top Con

No support for Bitmap fonts

So if you like Proggy or another bitmap font for your terminal, you're out of luck. The developer has stated that bitmap fonts will not be supported due to their incompatibility with font resizing. See More

AuthenticJavine's Experience

Easy to configure. Easy to use. See More

Top Pro

Multiple terminal windows

Supports tiling multiple terminal windows side by side in different layouts without needing to use an extra program like tmux. 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

HilariousBaalshamin's Experience

Blazing Fast with the right configs, can leave alacritty far behind if configured well. Works well with high refresh rate screens and modern GPUs. Not a good idea for old hardware, might see tearing and bad font rendering on low end hardware if configured badly. Very easy to configure. See More

Top Pro

Unicode

Uses Unicode for the best character compatibility. See More

Top Con

No tabbed sessions

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

Jelle De Loecker's Experience

It's missing some features I really need, and having to do everything via the keyboard is a pain. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Linux and macOS. See More

Top Con

Some keys are not accepted

LANG1(a.k.a. Hangul) key simply doesn't work. For example, when using kinesis savant 2 footswitch for modifier keys, the ctrl key doesn't work either. (Weirdly, the shift key works). See More

ArtisticLamia's Experience

Supports font ligatures, extremely fast, and sane defaults makes kitty hard to beat. See More

Top Pro

Open URLs in browser easily with keyboard

With Ctrl-Shift-e you get a numbered list of all URLs on the screen and you can select one by number with the keyboard to open it in the browser. See More

CourteousFides's Experience

Went looking for a replacement for Gnome-Terminal, that keeps segfaulting on me. found Kitty and it simply always works! It is fast and very much adaptable. Also very nice is the possibility to use Tabs and different layouts. See More

Top Pro

Has Kittens

A framework for easily creating terminal programs that make use of its advanced features. See More

Adam Antoni Dobrowolski's Experience

Easy to install and configure, just moved from xterm for font support and don't see any drawbacks. See More

Top Pro

Startup sessions

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

ReceptiveHeXiangu's Experience

Dev maintains poorly See More

Top Pro

Allows to view scroll back buffer in less

With Ctrl-Shift-H you can view the scrollback buffer in less and navigate with a bit more comfort. See More

Top Pro

Scriptable interface

Remote control commands allow scripting from sub processes. See More

Top Pro

Can display images in terminal with icat kitten

Top Pro

Config file is neatly arranged and everything is explained with comments

Top Pro

Perfect tab support, especially for vim users

The keys needed to create, browse and quit tabs are intuitive and does not overlap with vim. The tab bar is also well designed and looks distinct from any bar that you could be using on vim. See More

Top Pro

Source code available

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

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

See All

39 Other Options Considered

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

Cannot into ligatures

Alacritty does not support ligatures in Fira Code, Iosevka etc. 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

Specs

Font Ligatures:No

Configurable:Yes, via automatically reloading YAML configuration file

GPU Acceleration:Yes

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

Unreliable Font Rendering

Like a box of chocolate you never know what you're going to get. See More

Air Dedman's Experience

I really want to like alacrity but it's just missing too much and the font rendering is unreliable 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

PersistentMushmahhu's Experience

fast See More

Top Pro

Looks good

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

WorthyAjatar's Experience

The fastest terminal emulator I have ever used. See More

Top Pro

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

firebird's Experience

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

Top Pro

Has text ref-low when window is resized

Semi's Experience

From my experience, Alacritty is absolutely the fastest terminal emulator that I've used. I really enjoy the easy configuration that can be done. The only issue I really have with it is that it does use a decent bit more memory than others, it really is worth it for the insane speed it enables. See More

Top Pro

Fast and simple but with true color support

It's simple and fast like xterm or urxvt but with truecolor support which is a big plus if you use a terminal based code editor. Basically Alacritty has all the features you need and nothing you don't (if you're using tmux for multiplexing). See More

PositiveCantzicnal's Experience

Running Alacrity 0.4.0 on Gentoo. The rendering is much faster than on any other terminal emulator I have tried. There is a scrollback buffer now, as well as text reflow on window resize. The yml configuration file is great, once you get used to its sensitivity to spacing. The default font size and colors, at least on Gentoo, were funny and I needed to change them. 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

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 (though it's pretty easy to do for someone who knows how to edit config files). See More

InterestingPundjel's Experience

extremely fast, very good for old computers and despite the need to recompile to change settings, it is very simple to configure. 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

Text is cut off when resizing windows

In the vanilla build, 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

André Pereira's Experience

Undoubtedly the fastest and most configurable. See More

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

Crashes when some characters or colored fonts are displayed

SmartAello's Experience

Fast, light, and clean. Patching is not hard if you use st-flexipatch, and configuration is very simple. See More

Top Pro

Developer team has the philosophy of delivering a reliable product without bugs

In keeping with the "suckless" philosophy of the developer team that created it, the st project aims to create a reliable, lightweight terminal emulator without surprising bugs. Part of the strategy for that involves leaving out any features that can be better provided by other tools. This "suckless" philosophy holds that duplicating features across multiple tools leads to bloat and complexity that have an impact on reliability and usability. 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

ThoughtfulTlazolteotl's Experience

It doesn't support copy /paste operations... 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

DignifiedYopaat's Experience

Hackable and lightweight. I love software minimalism. See More

Top Pro

Clean

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable. See More

Top Con

Internal border/margins

Doesn't support internal margins. See More

HealthyAkhushtal's Experience

small, fast See More

Top Pro

Patches are great

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

Top Con

Source code edits (aka configs) need to be redone after updating

PerfectNamtar's Experience

small but very capable See More

Top Pro

Minimalist

Hackable and lightweight. See More

Top Con

Imperfect fontconfig support for CJK characters

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

PoliteLadon's Experience

Easy to adapt to personal needs. 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

DedicatedBes's Experience

beats everything else. 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

TirelessTawhirimatea's Experience

There's no actual name of this font. At the download link leads to the website, but still no name of the actual font where could be downloaded as ttf format. See More

Top Pro

Blazing fast

it is extremely responsive and fast, even on older computers. See More

EmbiggenedWagyl's Experience

Very speedy, not bloated, good unicode and color support, "Just works." See More

Top Pro

Clean

The terminal doesn't have any bloated features nobody uses. It is very minimal and extendable. See More

Rwithik Manoj's Experience

st is a See More

See All

Terminator

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

Been using Terminator for quite a while, mainly for running the same set of commands against multiple remote machines; I must say Terminator has an impressive lot to offer, often surprising me by offering out-of-the-box even the minutest niche feature that I've been looking for! See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

You can change the size, color, and give different shapes to the terminal. You can also save multiple layouts and profiles via the GUI preferences editor. See More

Top Con

Poor text search

Text search in Terminator does not highlight matching patterns when found. It just shows the row containing one of the matching patterns at the top of the terminal. This way text search is still usable, but not the best. See More

Jelle De Loecker's Experience

I've been using Terminator for many years. It's the easiest tab- and panel-based terminal emulator out there, which good support for the mouse & a simple GUI configuration. See More

Top Pro

Can type on multiple grouped terminals simultaneously

You can type at the same time on any number of arbitrarily grouped terminals. (Or all at once, or only the focussed, all switchable with a shortcut or menu item). See More

Top Con

Starting up can be slow

Terminator can be pretty slow (as far as terminals go) when first starting up. See More

kmf's Experience

I feel in control and it works as expected See More

Top Pro

Extendable functionality through plugins

Terminator functionality can be extended via plugins. Examples of this include: Custom commands URL handlers (on top of common ones) for apt, launchpad, maven Logging output to file See More

Top Con

Buggy and crashy

Crashes and closes many times a day when using split (and unsplit) shortcuts. The developers don't accept a bug report if isn't critical or not easy to reproduce. See More

PoisedLelantos's Experience

It's the best terminal I ever tried, and I'm still using it to this day, I highly recommend it See More

Top Pro

Save and launch layouts of terminals

Terminator allows the user to save, configure, and launch arrangements of windows, tabs, and terminals. See More

Top Con

Bug - unable enter text after a while

A while after having a terminal window open, entering text is impossible. The terminal just sits there, not frozen, but with an empty command line. See More

PioneeringItzpapalotl's Experience

Quick splitting of terminal windows and resizing with keyboard shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Configurable scrollback buffer

The scrollback lines can be set to a preferred value, or set to infinite scrollback. See More

Top Con

Unable to specify startup window dimensions

Some users like their terminal windows to be a particular number of characters wide and tall. The default is 80x24 but some prefer something larger. Manually resizing every new instance gets old fast. See More

Ajay Kumar Rawani's Experience

Awesome ! See More

Top Pro

Can act as a drop-down terminal

If you want to use Terminator as a drop-down terminal, you can do so by editing the config file and set whichever key you want to use as a trigger. See More

Top Con

Multiple line copy and paste does not work correctly.

If an output line wraps onto two lines copying and pasting it will insert a line break character between the two lines even though the was no line break in the original output. Thus it is impossible to copy/paste lines longer than the terminal width. See More

PoisedAlpheus's Experience

Much better than others See More

Top Pro

Configurable shortcuts

Many actions in Terminator can be triggered with configurable shortcuts. See More

Top Con

Updating terminal layouts via the preferences window is hard

It's easy to save & name your current layout, but it's hard to edit it. Especially when you use custom startup commands per pane. See More

TirelessIllapa's Experience

Love this terminal See More

Top Pro

Both true and fake transparency

If you have a compositor, you can use true transparency. You can also have a fake transparency where an image can be used as a fake desktop. Both of these can be tinted with the background color too. See More

Top Con

It uses the GTK VTE widget which does not support newest features

Newer and, admittedly, non-standard terminal features can't be used in Terminator. See More

OpinionatedPhylonoe's Experience

Unmaintained. Doesn't use the SSH agent, so get ready to type your SSH password each time, if you use one. See More

Top Pro

Desktop notifications on silence and/or activity

There is a standard notification pop-up that appears if a terminal is silent for a configurable period, or if it has new activity. See More

Top Con

Cannot disable zooming

The ctrl + mouse scroll key binding can't be disabled. See More

NachoAz's Experience

Easy to use. Simple. Configurable via xfile. Easy shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Familiar to GNOME-Terminal users

When not constrained by it's own general principles and unique features, Terminator tries to follow the GNOME-Terminal way of doing things. See More

Top Con

Redundant

Just use tmux instead. See More

Sassan Haradji's Experience

Really poor, the main problem is vte, as long as Terminator is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. See More

Top Pro

Zoom and Maximize a single terminal for aiding focus

You can zoom (font size increases) or maximize (font size does not increase) a single terminal to fill the whole window with a shortcut. All the other terminals remain open, they are just hidden from sight, and everything is restored by repeating the shortcut. See More

Top Con

Ugly looking

The interface and the preferences window look outdated. See More

v3ree's Experience

Tilix does it better. See More

Top Pro

Comes with an extensive manual

Every single aspect of Terminator is exhaustively documented, and can be quickly opened with the common shortcut F1 (which is configurable, of course). See More

Top Pro

User-friendly

Terminator has tabs, drag and drop re-ordering of terminals, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to help the user. It also has an extensive preferences window, or if you have to, a plain text config file. See More

Top Pro

Tries to reduce resource usage through DBus

Unless this option is disabled (it's enabled by default), Terminator will only run the first instance as a process. And when it's run again, the DBus server will simply open a new window using the old process. This helps a lot with reducing resource usage. See More

Top Pro

Can save logs

Terminator has a really helpful functionality that lets the user start/stop a logger in order to save the text written in the shell into a file. In order to do this, the user needs to turn on the logging plugin in the plugin settings, and then a "start logger" menu item will appear in a right click menu when using the terminal. The user is also able to pick the path they would like the logs saved to when turning the plugin on. See More

Top Pro

Content reflow when a terminal is resized

If you have long lines of text inside a terminal and then you change the size of the terminal, the text will also automatically update according to the new size. See More

Top Pro

Can be driven by a script through DBus

Some activities can be scripted using a tool called remotinator which uses the DBus interface to command the application to perform a limited set of tasks. See More

Top Pro

Tilix Config is easy and flexible

See All

Konsole

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

While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app, making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue. See More

Ganton's Experience

split-view, tabs, embedded in Krusader, Dolphin... See More

Top Pro

Directory and SSH bookmarking

Konsole can bookmark ssh and telnet sessions, directories, and it can open tabs in a folder for easy access. See More

Top Con

Uses a lot of memory

Although it's very fast, konsole has to use a lot of resources in return. It may use up to 30 MB per instance, depending on the number of tabs and the task at hand. See More

PatientBaalHammon's Experience

functionality most riched! See More

Top Pro

True color and Smooth font

Konsole supports true color and smooth font. This made konsole more fanstatic than other terminal emulators. See More

Top Con

No good support for powerline character even with patched fonts

Sayyid Hamid Mahdavi's Experience

easy to use and feature full See More

Top Pro

Embeddable into the desktop

Konsole can be embedded into desktop so it's always easily accessible, but not in the way of other windows. See More

Top Con

Can mess terminal keybinds

Most the of the time, the terminal keybinds are just ignored to obey the kde keybinds. Can be configured though. See More

Top Pro

Export of output in plain text or HTML format

By going to file > save output, you can send all screen output to a text file. See More

Top Con

Lack of DECSCUSR support

Konsole don't allow changing the cursor shape with extended DECSCUSR sequences, using instead the temporary-profile hack. This causes pain when working in (neo)vim inside Konsole. See More

Top Pro

Support in Dolphin file manager

Konsole can be accessed by pressing F4 in Dolphin, which is convenient for when the user needs to open the terminal in a particular spot of the file structure. See More

Top Con

No support for double-width characters

Konsole no supports double width characters. For powerline users, you need to add a space after powerline glyph. See More

Top Pro

Supports font ligature

Most terminals in Linux don't support font ligature, while many modern fonts such as PragmataPro or Fira Code already have decent coverage of font ligature. Support for font ligature makes user experience and font management much easier (i.e. you don't need to keep two copies of the same font just to use in the console) See More

Top Pro

Helps to identify tabs using custom icons

Users can associate each bookmark or SSH session with a custom icon, thus giving a visual hint to quickly identify a tab when a lot of tabs are open. See More

Top Pro

Supports advanced color schemes

In particular solarized. See More

Top Pro

Notification alerts about activity in a terminal

Konsole can monitor activities and notify the user through system notifications when a certain activity happens. This is a very customizable feature too: you can write scripts that can use this feature and notify you for whatever you want. See More

Top Pro

Exceptionally fast

Konsole is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB. See More

Top Pro

Customize and save profiles

Profiles containing different settings can be created, saved, and loaded. Color schemes, window transparency, scroll bar, key bindings, start-up commands, window border, and menu bar can all be customized according to the user's needs. See More

Top Pro

Allows CTRL-SHIFT-c/v within WSL Ubuntu as well

Good menu to customize. 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

libvte/gtk

It has gnome dependencies. See More

SharpManat's Experience

Sable and lightweight See More

Top Pro

Great unicode support

Even shows combining chars correctly. See More

Top Con

Doesn't provide many configuration options

Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities. See More

Top Pro

Few dependencies

Top Pro

True colour support

Supports full 24-bit color. 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

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

Ready for wayland

See All

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

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

WittyNgai's Experience

A great middle ground between the blazing fast bare minimum (st, xterm, urxvt) and the slower but feature-packed heavyweights (Konsole, Terminology, Hyper). Supports most modern functionality (ssh, full colors, etc.) and quality of life features out of the box. Customization is quick and simple, albeit limited. Requires minimal resources. The feature which automatically copies mouse selections to the system clipboard is something you'll realize you can't live without. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of heavier alternatives, but that was never the goal with this terminal. 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

Resizing text resizes window

InquisitiveUksakka's Experience

simple yet effective especially for low-spec computers. See More

Top Pro

Tabs support

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

Top Con

No profiles

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

howtopam's Experience

xfce4-terminal allows numerous style configuration changes to toolbars, tabs. menus, window borders, font and background colors with opacity and transparency and even the option to be utilized in "drop-down" mode. See More

Top Pro

Almost everything is customizable

You can configure size, color, background, etc. 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

CrediblePinikir's Experience

I love how customizable this little guy is. No other terminal can compare to it! See More

Top Pro

Composition effects

Xfce4 terminal takes advantage of xfce composition effects. See More

Top Con

Does not support sixel images

OpinionatedPhylonoe's Experience

Very basic fork of the traditional gnome-terminal; not worth mentioning. See More

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Top Con

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

I.M. Rowse's Experience

Does not support sixel images. 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

DependableAkhushtal's Experience

95 See More

Top Pro

Customizable key bindings

JollyDeimos's Experience

It got a drop-down mode! So, apt-get remove guake!! See More

See All

Tilix

Top Pro

Multiple sessions inside a single window

In addition to tiling, Tilix supports placing separate sessions in tabs or switching from one to another through a sidebar. See More

Top Con

Unmaintained

Bugs and pull requests are not processed. See More

CreativeMelinoe's Experience

Looks great, never gave me any issues, has plenty of features and customization (including transparency, idk why other terminals don't do this.) See More

Top Pro

Integrates nicely into GNOME 3

Tilix follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and uses the UI patterns of this desktop environment. See More

Top Con

No font ligatures

PrudentSuadela's Experience

Crashing alot See More

Top Pro

Tiling makes for ease of use

The user can split terminals horizontally or vertically, according to their needs or preferences. See More

Top Con

Takes a bit more memory than Gnome terminal

Would've expected this to be more lightweight. See More

Buster Blue's Experience

A prime example of a modern terminal emulator, and also the one that integrates best with Gnome, even beating the official "Gnome Terminal". See More

Top Pro

Fancy looks

Tilix has that new GNOME look, with a HeaderBar. It can also be disabled. See More

Top Con

Heavyweight

Tilix has quite a lot of dependencies and takes ~100MB of RAM when running. See More

ConfidentPoena's Experience

Tilix is a full featured along with Quack option which most terminals miss and need to be installed as separate terminal. See More

Top Pro

Configurable shortcuts

Many actions in Tilix can be triggered with configurable shortcuts. See More

Massimiliano Adamo's Experience

simply the best See More

Top Pro

Can be used as a drop-down terminal

The new 1.30 version of Tilix supports a quake mode enabling it to work as a drop-down terminal. See More

Aurelius's Experience

I've been using Tilix ever since switching to Ubuntu Budgie about a year ago. It's absolutely great, especially if you aren't using a tiling WM but like to have tiled terminals. It makes A/B terminal surfing super easy; you can be editing code in one tile and reading a man page in another, for example. It's a bit heavyweight when it comes to RAM, but on modern systems this shouldn't be an issue at all. Definitely check out the keyboard shortcuts -- I use them all the time! See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast

As fast as gnome-terminal, if not faster. See More

Szymon's Experience

Snappier than Gnome terminal once it launches. Works very well with i3. Takes a bit longer to launch. See More

Top Pro

Good alternative to Terminator

Tiling and ability to type into multiple terminals simultaneously is Terminator's 2 most significant features. Tilix has them as well. See More

v3ree's Experience

Does everything that old Terminator does.. but in style! It's a nice example of a modern terminal emulator. See More

Top Pro

GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

Tilix follows GNOME HIG whereas gnome-terminal doesn't. GNOME should use Tilix as their default terminal. See More

Top Pro

Transparent background

Unlike the standard GNOME Terminal, Tilix supports configurable background transparency. See More

Top Pro

Copy on select

Top Pro

Copy as HTML

You can copy text from the terminal as HTML for embedding in web settings. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Top Pro

Lightweight

Top Pro

Able to write into multiple terminals simultaneously

Inside a session, you can select multiple terminals, which will receive the same input simultaneously. See More

Top Pro

Solarized themes built-in

Great support for solarized color schemes, and no setup is involved. See More

Top Pro

Faster than Gnome Terminal

When running commands it feels snappier. See More

Top Pro

Terminus can notify you about finished tasks and perform actions based on terminal output

See All

Guake

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

Not cross-platform

Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3. See More

RespectablePolybotes's Experience

F12 is so easy and nice to open the terminal 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

Sassan Haradji's Experience

The main problem is vte, as long as guake is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. 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 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

LoveableBunene's Experience

Easy to use, easy to keep track of the tabs and name them, making it clean and tidy. See More

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

ImaginativePudicitia's Experience

Great support by beautiful Gogh themes. Renamable tabs. Split terminal, highly customization. Drop down. Transparent. Pretty decent terminal overall (slightly better than Tilix imo). 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

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

Tabs support

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

xterm

Top Pro

Used in almost every Linux distribution

If you master xterm, you won't have to learn another tty, since it is in almost every Linux distribution. See More

Top Con

Bad defaults

Very small default size. No way to know to how to configure size. See More

I.M. Rowse's Experience

Supports sixel images. See More

Top Pro

Stable, well-tested

Top Con

No tabs

Top Pro

Standard with X Window system

Xterm is installed as standard software with the X Window system, and is there even when installing other terminal emulators. See More

Top Con

It blinks

If it blinks for you too, you can try this: man xterm and then press Shift+G. See More

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

Has few dependencies

Has dependencies like xbitmaps. See More

Top Pro

Shows full characters for wide fallback fonts

Many terminal emulators that deal with wider fallback fonts (i.e. double-wide characters in CJK fonts) truncate display of wide characters, show Unicode "missing glyph" characters, or simply fail to display the characters at all. XTerm is "smart" enough to simply take up the extra space needed to show such wide characters. See More

Top Con

No native transparency

Xterm does not natively support transparency (though it can be emulated if needs be). See More

Top Pro

In about 30 years, it had only one issue, and that was fixed quickly

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

Top Pro

It is fast and responsive

See this. See More

Top Con

Slowest Linux terminal

Top Pro

Many modern terminals emulate xterm

Many terminal applications, such as OS X's Terminal.app and iTerm2 (among others), all claim xterm or xterm- variants as their $TERM and aim for support of xterm's escape sequences. Many command-line applications will assume or even hard-code escape-sequences and behavior for xterm and those terminals emulating it. See More

Top Pro

Configurable via Xresources

X Toolkit resources and xrdb predates what is currently called "theme". Although one needs to read man, mitigates most listed cons See More

Top Pro

Supports sixel images

See All

Yakuake

Top Pro

Drop-down terminal makes for ease of use

Yakuake is a drop-down terminal. This means that you can press, for example, F12, and it slides downward from the top edge of the screen. After you are done with it, you can then hit F12 again and it slides back on top. See More

Top Con

KDE Library dependencies

While not an issue if using KDE, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers, there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app. This makes for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean, this may be an issue. See More

malevolent's Experience

After trying a lot of terminal emultators, I realized yakuake is the best out there. And yet it could add a very few cool features from other terminals, it has more options, configurations and personalizations than the competence. See More

Top Pro

Very customizable

Almost everything in Yakuake is customizable: from split view, fullscreen mode, configurable dimensions, to animation speed and keybindings. See More

Top Con

No sessions support

FearlessBirdu's Experience

I was going to switch to Guake, but I figured out there's a rich "Appearance preferences" in "Manage Profiles" who would have thought! I thought it's some kind of Session related staff See More

Top Pro

Split layout

You can easily split any tab into different windows and run several commands at the same time then monitor and change them with ease. You won't find this feature in guake or tilda! See More

Top Con

No Windows support

NeighborlyKuaFu's Experience

I found dropdown terminals a lot more usefult than having a bunch of floating terminal windows. Keeping this in mind, yakuake is far the best dropdown terminal. It has a bunch of features others doesn't have, is lightning fast and problably the most lightweigh out there. I have it installed even on systems with xfce or i3wm, despite I need to install a few dependencies (people who say it has "a lot" of dependenciess, doesn't say they are less than 200MB, and probably less if you already have any Qt application already installed). The hability to avoid using the mouse while working is crucial in my job, and with yakuake you can acomplish it almost entirely, is highly configurable and pretty eye candy, besides the fastest response and small memory footprint I told before. See More

Top Pro

Tabs support

Yakuake supports tabs, while working with several tabs is very easy. By default: to open a new tab press Ctrl + Shift + t. To move through them: Shift + left/right arrow. See More

Top Con

Theming options are very limited, Does not integrate naturally with the DE

Top Pro

Similar with Konsole's features

Line-by-line scroll with Shift-Up, configurable - possibly infinite scrollback, Unicode support, componistion/transparency, splits + keyboard navigation, visual highlighting. See More

Top Con

Slow

Is not slow at all. I have yakuake installed in all my computers (8) and it launches immediatly after pressing the hotkey. Must be a error from yourt side. Yakuake has started to get really slow with the latest updates: it takes up to 3 seconds to start up after you have clicked the assigned hotkey. See More

Top Pro

Unlimited scroll history

You can scroll, inside the same terminal session, infinitely, so no command should be lost, even it isn't stored yet on history. See More

Top Con

Heavy

Not true at all. I from far one of the lightiest graphical terminals out there. Mine is 14MB with a bunch of split views and 4 tabs at the moment of writing this. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Opens at 40MB and stays below 100MB with some tabs splitted in four each. So if you need to have many terminals emulators opened in your desktop environment, is the a very light solution for all the features it includes. See More

Top Pro

Quick move through splits and tabs

You can move through terminals with Ctrl+Shift+Cursors or tabs with Shift+Cursor keys, so no need to touch you mouse or pad, making working with terms even faster. See More

Top Pro

Monitor for activity/silence

When an activity is let working (e.g.: compiling some source or upgrading some system), and you forgot it, a nice popup and sound will alert you when the command prompt returned on that term. See More

Top Pro

Enhanced focused terminal

You can configure yakuake to show a visual altert when you change the terminal. So even if you have many splittings and you don't use the mouse to change between them, you can easily see where you are at any moment. See More

Top Pro

Save output as text

You can save the output of a terminal directly to a text file, to work properly with it later. See More

Top Pro

Wayland support

As the entire Plasma Desktop, yakuake already has full support for Wayland. See More

Top Pro

Quick search support

Search directly in your favourite search engine just by selecting something and right clicking. It will open the browser result page. See More

See All

Terminology

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

Scalable fonts

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

WalstonTempest's Experience

A winner on looks with functionality, my choice everytime. Has some quirky keyboard shortcuts to master, if you want to get the most from it. See More

Top Con

No True-Color support

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

Top Pro

Looks smashing

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

Aurelius's Experience

Just tried Terminology out for the first time. I've been using Tilix for ages, and wanted to see what else was out there. This terminal is very slick and flashy, which I like! It's a breath of fresh air into the terminal emulator scene, which is almost always very boring and flat. They manage to do this without compromising on usability or speed, which is awesome. It's very customizable, and it tiles like Tilix which is a huge plus. I now have both in my Plank, we'll see which one gets more usage in the long run. 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

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

No scrollbar

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

Top Pro

Splitable

You can split windows, like in terminator. 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

Visually customizable

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

Gnome Terminal

Top Pro

Good integration with other GNOME-Shell apps

Gnome Terminal integrates well into Gnome Desktop, as well as the rest of the core Gnome Shell apps. See More

Top Con

No background transparency

While this used to be a good option, background transparency has been removed. See More

TirelessTawrich's Experience

I used to love Gnome Terminal, but for the past few years it has only gotten worse and worse with every update, just like a bad movie series where every sequel is worse than the previous film. It's never a good sign when the devs deleting features with bugs instead of fixing said bugs... See More

Specs

License:GPLv3+

Source repository:https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal

Top Pro

Exceptionally fast

The Gnome Terminal is usually very fast. It boots up very quickly and takes less than a second (averages to 0.25-0.59 seconds) to display files of up to 600 MB. See More

Top Con

Gnome library dependencies

While not an issue if using Gnome, when trying to use this terminal in other desktop environments or window managers there will be a large amount of dependencies tied to the app making for a large install size. For those trying to keep their desktop lean this may be an issue. See More

DeliberateCheuksin's Experience

No support for split terminals Splitting terminals is really a wonderful feature nowadays when your screen is huge. Having multiple instances of the same program all over it is just painful to manage. See More

Top Pro

Support for tabs

Gnome Terminal allows for the use of tabs by right clicking in the terminal window and selecting open new tab or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+t by default. See More

Top Con

Font rendering doesn't look good

it seems that everything is fatter per default. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

Fast, full feature set, customisable. I've used Gnome terminal for years, and still haven't found a certain feature to be missing. See More

Top Pro

Supports scrolling

You can scroll up and down in Gnome terminal. And if you wish to do so, you can also hide the scrollbar. See More

Top Con

Heavyweight

To achieve a large amount of speed, Gnome Terminal has to use a relatively large amount of memory to run. It may eat up to 15-30 MB per instance, depending on the task it's doing. See More

DelightfulNeptune's Experience

Simple, easily customizable, and good integration with gnome environment See More

Top Pro

Solarized colors

Gnome Terminal comes with a solarized colorscheme installed and ready to use. See More

Top Con

No tab names

Since Gnome 3, the feature for manual renaming of tabs was reaped off. See More

AwesomestSaubarag's Experience

Crashes all the time, taking all instances down together. See More

Top Pro

Content re-flow when window is resized

When using the GNOME Terminal, if you have long lines of text inside it and then you change the window, the text will also automatically update according to the new window size. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support font ligature still in 2019

gnome-terminal uses vte for its terminal emulator, 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

Sassan Haradji's Experience

Really poor, the main problem is vte, as long as gnome-terminal is using vte I can't see a good future for it. vte is a broken terminal emulator with maintainers that have no idea what terminal emulation is about nor they have any idea what open source is. 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

Top Con

Incomplete vt handling due to using libvte

ImaginativePudicitia's Experience

Ugly design, esp the one inUbuntu 18.04. no tab renaming, waste a lots of screen space for extra title bar. See More

Top Pro

Configurable keybindings

Configurable key bindings can be used for copy-paste, sending SIGINT, switching tabs, and so on. See More

Top Con

Restrictive license

v3ree's Experience

It's simple and has all the basics, it integrates well in Gnome and it looks good, it's perfect for a terminal multiplexer like tmux if you want tiling / sessions. See More

Top Pro

Transparency

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

Top Pro

Open Source

Top Pro

Drop-down support

Drop-down functionality can be added to Gnome Terminal via an extension. See More

Top Pro

Clever memory management

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

Getting better and better over time

Tilix used to surpass gnome-terminal but right now they are both the best options unless you have special needs. See More

See All

Tilda

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

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

DevotedIkuTurso's Experience

Adding and Closing Tabs with keyboard shortcut is problematic. 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

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 Pro

Supports transparency

You can monitor information displayed by applications under Tilda. 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

See All

Pantheon Terminal

Top Pro

End process notifications

When a process has ended, Pantheon Terminal sends a notification bubble to the desktop notification server and indicates which tab generated the notification. See More

Top Con

Heavy

davidak's Experience

Beautiful and user friendly terminal. See More

Top Pro

Can easily restore a previous session

Pantheon Terminal remembers the window size, position, windowed/maximized/fullscreen state, and open tabs in between sessions. See More

Top Con

limited customization options

IncredibleDeimos's Experience

Good looking in just out of box! See More

Top Pro

Advanced tab handling

Using the Granite Dynamic Notebook widget (which includes tab close history), double click the tab bar for a new tab, duplicating tabs, quickly closing all other tabs, auto-hiding/revealing tab close buttons, etc. See More

Top Con

RAM usage increases considerably over time

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

score 353 · Accepted Answer

rxvt-unicode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

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

Supports multiple font types

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

Air Dedman's Experience

Old and doesn't do as well as Kitty or even alacritty. Not sure if is usable on Wayland yet either. See More

Top Pro

Handles bold text colour properly

Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs. See More

Top Con

Bloated

Exists because Xterm is complete trash. Although it has a lot of features, you will most likely never use them all. See More

AuthenticJavine's Experience

Faster than kitty in loading time . See More

Top Pro

High performance

Rxvt-unicode is much faster than most alternatives. 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

HonorableCelaeno's Experience

don't work 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

IntuitiveMacGreine's Experience

So light! See More

Top Pro

Proper wrapping support

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

Archived's Experience

Simple, internal border, and pixmap support (pixbuf). 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

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

DignifiedYopaat's Experience

Bloated 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

See All

What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

The Best 2 of 41 OptionsWhy?

rxvt-unicode

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

Supports terminal transparency

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

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Supports multiple font types

Unicode rendering is buggy

Handles bold text colour properly

Bloated

High performance

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

Unicode support

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Proper wrapping support

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

Fast text rendering

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

Built-in Perl interpreter

kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

High-performance

Very unique support issue with SSH

True Color support

Depends on Python

OpenGL for rendering

Everything has to be done via the keyboard

Supports font ligatures

Minority issues will not be dealt with

Tries to move the state of terminal emulation forward

Still new

Designed for Powerusers

No support for Bitmap fonts

Multiple terminal windows

No centralized configuration

Unicode

No tabbed sessions

Cross-platform

Some keys are not accepted

Open URLs in browser easily with keyboard

Has Kittens

Startup sessions

Allows to view scroll back buffer in less

Scriptable interface

Can display images in terminal with icat kitten

Config file is neatly arranged and everything is explained with comments

Perfect tab support, especially for vim users

Source code available

Includes additional features over PuTTy

39 Other Options Considered

Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

My Recommendation for Alacritty

Blazing fast rendering with GPU-accelerated

Cannot into ligatures

Simple configuration

Unreliable Font Rendering

Comprehensive font options

Sacrifices basic features for raw performance

Looks good

Has support for image previews in w3m and ranger

Has text ref-low when window is resized

Fast and simple but with true color support

st

My Recommendation for st

My Recommendation for st

Low memory usage

Configuration requires recompiling

Extremely simple architecture

Text is cut off when resizing windows

24-bit "True Color" support

Crashes when some characters or colored fonts are displayed