What are the best Linux terminal emulators?

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46

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Considered

2.2K

User
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35 mins

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Here’s the Deal

The Best 2 of 39 OptionsWhy?

Best Linux terminal emulators	Price	Last Updated
93 rxvt-unicode	-	Jun 17, 2021
90 kitty	-	Jun 6, 2021
88 Termite	-	May 18, 2021
88 Guake	-	May 15, 2021
88 Terminator	-	Jun 15, 2021

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kitty

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

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37 Other Options Considered

Termite

Top Pro

Display images

Ranger image preview works in termite. See More

Top Con

Slow text rendering

See All

Guake

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

Top Pro

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

Terminator

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

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

PatientBaalHammon's Experience

functionality most riched! See More

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

Uses a lot of memory

Top Pro

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

Good menu to customize. See More

See All

Xfce4 terminal

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Top Pro

Customizable key bindings

See All

st

Top Pro

Clean

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

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

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

Tilix

Top Pro

Configurable shortcuts

Many actions in Tilix can be triggered with configurable shortcuts. 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

Extremely fast

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

v3ree'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

No native transparency

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

Experiences

2

Pros

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

hyper

Top Pro

Cross-platform due to electron browser-based foundation

Although not Windows-friendly. But nobody uses Windows terminal anyway. See More

Top Con

Made with Electron

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

BrilliantGeshtuE's Experience

Top Pro

Can hide menu bar

Top Con

Not very customizable

LXTerminal, like XTerminal and UXTerminal, is not very customizable and extendable (at least not as much as other terminal emulators). See More

CooperativeCicholGricenchos's Experience

Top Pro

Handles bold text colour properly

Displays characters with text attribute bold actually as bold glyphs. 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

Proper wrapping support

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

See All

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The Best 2 of 39 OptionsWhy?

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 multiple font types

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

Supports terminal transparency

Unicode rendering is buggy

Minimum dependencies and simple text config

No support yet for 24-bit "True Color"

High performance

In daemon mode you can lose all your terminals

Unicode support

Font size cannot be changed on the fly with the mousewheel

Fast text rendering

Bloated

Built-in Perl interpreter

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

Handles bold text colour properly

No option to have a "reverse color" cursor

Proper wrapping support

My Recommendation for kitty

My Recommendation for kitty

High-performance

Everything has to be done via the kayboard

OpenGL for rendering

Depends on Python

Tries to move the state of terminal emulation forward

No Wayland support

True Color support

Very unique support issue with SSH

Designed for Powerusers

No centralized configuration

Unicode

No tabbed sessions.

Multiple terminal windows

Still new

Cross-platform

No support for Bitmap fonts

Supports font ligatures

Some keys are not accepted

Startup sessions

Has Kittens

Open URLs in browser easily with keyboard

Allows to view scroll back buffer in less

Scriptable interface

Config file is neatly arranged and everything is explained with comments.

Can display images in terminal with icat kitten.

Perfect tab support, especially for vim users.

Source code available

Includes additional features over PuTTy

37 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for Termite

My Recommendation for Termite

Minimal terminal emulator

Difficult to install in some distros

Vim-like behavior

Cannot set specific parameters through CLI arguments

Works great with a tiling window manager

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

Display images

Slow text rendering

My Recommendation for Guake

My Recommendation for Guake

Drop-down terminal

Not cross-platform

Extremely customizable

Not very responsive

Supports transparency