A terminal emulator is a program that replicates the function of a classic hardware text terminal, giving access to the operating system through a command-line interface. Modern terminal emulators add GPU acceleration, true-color support, ligatures, multiplexing, and plugin ecosystems on top of the classic shell experience. This note also covers terminal file managers — TUI tools for navigating the filesystem without leaving the terminal — and terminal rendering tools for rich content display in the shell.
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| URXVT | Customizable terminal emulator |
| Alacritty | A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator |
| Hyper | A terminal built on web technologies |
| Kitty | Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal |
| Wezterm | A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer |
| Tabby | A terminal for a more modern age |
| Superfile | Pretty fancy and modern terminal file manager |
| Yazi | Blazing-fast terminal file manager built on async I/O |
| Glow | Render Markdown in the terminal with style |