A terminal emulator is your gateway to the real world of Linux. Behind the fancy GUI themed interfaces, a whole new world awaits, and users must familiarize themselves with the command line interface sooner or later.
Indeed, unless you want to be typing from the tty each time, a terminal emulator is quite important to have. However, with so many options to choose from, it does beg the question – what is the best terminal emulator, and which ones are actually worth using?
While most terminal emulators function more or less the same these days, there are quite a few notable entries which offer an unparalleled amount of customization, flexibility and performance. Five such terminal emulators can be found discussed below.
Top 5 Linux terminal emulators
1) Kitty
Kitty aims to be a dead simple, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. It’s written with C and Python, and is one of the faster terminals out there. Kitty also comes with a bunch of niceties, such as ImageMagick support, tiling and more.
It also has shortcut support in its simple configuration file. It’s a great option for tiling window managers.
2) Alacritty
Much like Kitty, Alacritty is yet another GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. Unlike Kitty though, it is written in Rust, utilizing OpenGL for a smoother experience. Alacritty is fast and supports true color, among other features.
Interestingly, it foregoes the ability to split tabs, which makes it ideal for use with tiling window managers (which come with that function baked in).
3) Konsole
Konsole is the default terminal emulator for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It’s a very capable terminal, and is also quite customizable, backed with a very easy to use configurator GUI.
It’s also the one most users will recognize – thanks to its integration within the Steam Deck’s KDE plasma Desktop Mode.
4) Foot
As described by the ArchWiki, Foot is a lightweight, minimalistic terminal emulator. It focuses on pure simplicity, and lacks many of the features present within the other entries of this particular list.
Foot is however, designed for Wayland systems only. Its main strength lies in its ease of use and simplicity, which makes it barely hog any resources.
5) Terminator
Terminator is also another popular Linux application. Much like Alacritty and Kitty, Terminator is also capable of using the graphics device for acceleration, resulting in some nicer looking fonts and the like.
The program also supports shortcuts, color schemes and more using its configuration file.
