10 Best Linux Terminal Emulators for Power Users

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The terminal emulator is an essential program for Linux users. It grants every user access to the shell. Bash is the most common shell for Linux and UNIX distributions; it’s powerful and essential for both novice and advanced users. So, in this post, you will learn about the great alternatives to your default Linux terminal emulator.

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10 Best Terminal Emulators for Linux

1. Terminator

This project’s purpose is to create a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is influenced by applications like gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, and others in that it focuses on organizing terminals in grids.

Features At A Glance

  • Arrange terminals in a grid
  • Tabs
  • Drag and drop re-ordering of terminals
  • Lots of keyboard shortcuts
  • Save multiple layouts and profiles via GUI preferences editor
  • Simultaneous typing to arbitrary groups of terminals

You can install Terminator typing – 

sudo apt-get install terminator

2. Tilda – a drop-down terminal

Tilda’s unique feature is that it does not operate like a typical window; instead, it may be dragged up and down from the top of the screen using a custom hotkey. Tilda is also highly customizable. It is possible to adjust the hotkeys for keybindings, change the appearance, and many other variables that influence Tilda’s behavior. Tilda is available for Ubuntu and Fedora via the package manager, as well as on GitHub.

Also read – Terminator Emulator With Multiple Terminals In One Window

3. Guake

Guake a drop-down terminal emulator similar to Tilda or yakuake. You can add features to Guake but you must be familiar with Python, Git and GTK.You can find the Guake source code on GitHub.

Features At A Glance

  • Lightweight
  • Simple Easy and Elegant
  • Smooth integration of terminal into GUI
  • Appears when you call and disappears once you are done by pressing a predefined hotkey (F12 by default)
  • Compiz transparency support
  • Multi-tab
  • Plenty of color palettes
  • and more …
Project Website

4. ROXTerm

If you want a lightweight and highly customizable terminal emulator, ROXTerm is the one for you. It is a terminal emulator based on the same VTE library as gnome-terminal, with similar capabilities. It was initially designed to have a smaller footprint and a faster start-up time than gnome-terminal, and it’s more customizable and aimed primarily at “power” users that use terminals frequently.

ROXTerm supports multiple tabs, split windows, and a wide range of customization options. It also has support for many popular terminal emulators such as xterm, rxvt, and konsole. Additionally, it can be used to run any command-line application or script.

Project Website

5. XTerm

XTerm is the most commonly used terminal for Linux and UNIX systems and the default terminal for X Window System. It is easy to use and extremely light.

It is also highly customizable, allowing users to customize the look and feel of their terminal. XTerm has a wide range of features such as tabbed windows, copy and paste support, and a powerful command line interface.

Also, read – Guake Another Linux Terminal Emulator

6. Eterm

If you’re looking for a fantastic and powerful terminal emulator, Eterm is the way to go. Eterm is a color vt102 terminal emulator designed to replace XTerm. It is built with a Freedom of Choice philosophy in mind, giving the user as much power, flexibility, and freedom as possible.

The designers of Eterm aimed to make it lightweight and fast yet provide a wide range of features. Eterm supports 256 colors, multiple tabs, customizable keybindings and more. You can easily use it thanks to its intuitive user interface. Eterm is also highly configurable and you can customize it to fit your needs.

Project Website

7. Gnome Terminal

GNOME Terminal is a popular terminal emulator among Linux users because it’s part of the GNOME Desktop environment. It offers many features and supports many themes. Most Linux distributions include it by default and you can also install it using your package manager. It supports multiple tabs, profiles and custom key bindings. It also supports Unicode characters and has a search feature to quickly find commands.

8. Sakura

Sakura is a terminal emulator based solely on GTK and VTE. It is a terminal emulator with little requirements so you don’t need to install the entire GNOME desktop to have a functional terminal emulator.

Sakura is available for most Linux distributions, so you can install it using your package manager.

9. LilyTerm

LilyTerm is a terminal emulator based on libvte that tries to be quick and lightweight. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

Features At A Glance

  • Low resource consumption
  • Multi Tab
  • Color scheme
  • Hyperlink support
  • Fullscreen support
  • and many others …

10. Konsole

You must know Konsole if you use KDE or Plasma. It is KDE’s default terminal emulator and one of my favorites because it’s comfortable and useful. It is available for Ubuntu and Fedora but if you are using Ubuntu, you need to choose another alternative or consider Kubuntu.

Konsole has many features, such as tabs, split views, profiles, and themes. It also supports various keyboard shortcuts and can be customized to fit your needs.You can also use it to run scripts or programs from the command line.

Conclusion

Linux terminal emulators are not limited to the ones listed above. I’ve found even more cool and useful terminal emulators while writing this article. If you use a terminal that I did not list in this article please let me know in the comments section below. I will update the list.