Alacritty
Alacritty is a modern, cross-platform terminal emulator powered by OpenGL that delivers GPU-accelerated performance with sensible defaults and extensive configuration. Rather than reimplementing functionality, it integrates seamlessly with other applications to provide a flexible feature set without sacrificing speed. Supported on BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows, Alacritty is considered beta and still under active development, yet it already serves many users as their daily driver terminal. Key features include Vi Mode for moving around and creating selections using vi bindings; a Search function for querying text within the scrollback buffer; Regex Hints that mark patterns for mouse or keyboard interaction; and Multi-Window support to improve resource usage by running on a single process.
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xterm
xterm is a terminal emulator for the X Window System, first released to emulate DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 hardware and provide a windowed interface for applications that cannot access X directly. Each xterm window runs as a separate process, locally or remotely, while sharing keyboard and mouse input with only the focused window receiving events. It implements ANSI/ISO color support via the “new” color model for background erase and recognizes most VT220 control sequences, along with select features from VT320, VT420, and VT520 devices. Over its history, xterm’s terminal description evolved from VT102 (pre-1996) to VT220 (1996–2012) and, since 2012, to VT420, ensuring compatibility with modern applications. Xterm remains actively maintained and extensible through companion tools like luit for encoding support and the X Toolkit for resource configuration, making it a complete, standards-compliant emulator for Unix-based environments.
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WezTerm
WezTerm is a high-performance, cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer built in Rust that delivers GPU-accelerated rendering, including ligatures, color emoji, true color, dynamic color schemes, and hyperlinks, and modern windowing controls such as panes, tabs, and multiple windows on both local and remote hosts. Its single-process multiplexer provides scrollback, searchable history, mouse integration, Quick Select mode for rapid selection, Copy mode, shell integration, support for the iTerm image protocol, SSH connectivity, serial ports, Arduino devices, and workspace/session management via Lua-configurable scripts. Configuration is handled through a wezterm.lua file with hot-reload support, while a rich command-line interface (wezterm cli) lets you spawn programs, manipulate tabs and panes, and set domains. WezTerm adheres to ECMA-48 and xterm conventions for full ANSI/ISO compliance and offers native UI integration using platform-specific APIs.
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Wave Terminal
Wave is an open-source, AI-native terminal built for seamless developer workflows with inline rendering, a modern UI, and persistent sessions.
Features Include:
- Render almost anything in line with plugins for images, Markdown, audio/video, and more.
- Edit code quickly with the same editor that powers VSCode locally and remotely.
- Persistent sessions, searchable universal history, and workspaces across local and remote sessions.
- Native AI integration with ChatGPT, with plans to allow users to bring their own AI (BYOLLM) in the future.
- Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, with packages available for both macOS and Linux.
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