Open Source Rust Terminal Emulators

WezTerm is a GPU-accelerated, cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer built in Rust by Wez Furlong. Designed for speed and modern hardware, WezTerm offers smooth rendering and excellent performance on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports multiple tabs and panes, configurable keybindings, and integrates well with shell environments. WezTerm is highly customizable and focuses on providing a powerful, flexible terminal experience for developers and system administrators. It also supports serial terminal emulation, making it useful beyond just local shells. The project is open source and maintained actively, with a vibrant community available for support via GitHub Discussions and chat platforms. With over 21,000 stars on GitHub, WezTerm is recognized for its speed, robustness, and developer-friendly features.

Alacritty is the fastest open source terminal emulator there is. How is it the fastest? With such a strong focus on simplicity and performance, Alacritty’s included features are very carefully considered, ensuring that it remains blazingly fast. It’s got a GPU for rendering that makes a whole lot of optimizations possible. In various benchmarked terminals, Alacritty has shown to be either faster, or way faster than others. Alacritty requires no additional setup, but still allows configuration of many aspects of the terminal. It supports Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD.

Ratty is a GPU-rendered terminal emulator that experiments with inline 3D graphics inside the terminal experience. It supports both traditional 2D terminal use and a 3D mode that reveals a warped terminal surface. The project includes inline 3D object support through its own Ratty Graphics Protocol, allowing objects to be registered, positioned, animated, scaled, and displayed in terminal space. It also supports GPU-backed text rendering and image display through terminal graphics protocols. ratty is written in Rust and uses graphics-oriented components to render the terminal in a more visual and playful way. Its main purpose is to explore what a terminal can become when it is treated as a graphical environment, not just a text grid.

Rio is a hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator built with Rust and WebGPU. It is designed to run across desktops and browser-oriented environments while keeping performance and usability at the center of the experience. The project supports modern terminal expectations such as 24-bit true color, tabs, split panes, font ligatures, and terminal graphics. Rio can display images through protocols such as Kitty, iTerm2, and Sixel, which makes it more capable for visual terminal workflows. It is cross-platform, with support for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD. Its main value is offering a modern, GPU-powered terminal that combines speed, visual polish, and broad platform reach.

MurmurSSH is an open-source SSH and SFTP client for Linux, designed as a simple, reliable, and fully local alternative to cloud-based or complex tools. It focuses on clarity and usability, offering a minimal interface, fast connection handling, and straightforward file operations. All profiles and configurations are stored locally — no accounts, syncing, or background services. MurmurSSH supports password and SSH key authentication, including passphrase-protected keys. Host key verification is handled transparently, allowing users to manage trust decisions per session or permanently. The integrated SFTP browser enables efficient file management, including upload, download, move, and recursive transfers with multi-file support. A terminal can be launched externally when needed, keeping workflows flexible without forcing an embedded terminal.

Kaku is a fast, out-of-the-box terminal built for AI coding workflows. It is a deeply customized fork of WezTerm that aims to provide practical defaults rather than requiring users to assemble a terminal setup from scratch. The app includes common developer shortcuts for tabs, windows, panes, settings, lazygit, file management, screen clearing, and AI-related actions. Kaku also includes an assistant mode that can help with automatic error recovery and natural-language command generation. It is designed for developers who use terminal-based AI coding agents and want a terminal that supports that workflow directly. Its main value is combining a polished terminal experience with shortcuts and behaviors tuned for modern AI-assisted development.