Ghostty
Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration to deliver speed, features, and familiarity without compromise. Ghostty provides fully standards-compliant emulation, drawing on ECMA-48 and xterm conventions, to ensure compatibility with existing shells and software, while its multi-renderer architecture leverages OpenGL (with ligature support) to sustain smooth rendering up to 60 fps under heavy load and minimal I/O jitter via a dedicated I/O thread. It offers modern windowing capabilities such as multi-window, tabbing, and splits, and embraces native platform experiences through SwiftUI and GTK4, all built atop a shared core written in Zig (“libghostty”) that can be embedded via a C API. Users benefit from basic customizability (fonts, backgrounds, colors), an opt-in feature set for interactive CLI tools, and performance competitive with leading terminal emulators.
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Byobu
It was originally designed to provide elegant enhancements to the otherwise functional, plain, practical GNU Screen, for the Ubuntu server distribution. Byobu now includes an enhanced profile, convenient keybindings, configuration utilities, and toggle-able system status notifications for both the GNU Screen window manager and the more modern Tmux terminal multiplexer, and works on most Linux, BSD, and Mac distributions. Byobu includes an enhanced profile, configuration utilities, and system status notifications for the GNU screen window manager as well as the Tmux terminal multiplexer. Byobu is developed and released as free software under the GPLv3.
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tmux
tmux is a terminal multiplexer that enables multiple terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. It allows sessions to be detached so they continue running in the background and later reattached exactly as left. tmux implements each window as a separate client process, supports ANSI/ISO color via VT220 (and later) control sequences, and is configurable through its example tmux.conf file and man page. Built atop minimal dependencies, libevent 2.x and ncurses, it requires only a C compiler, make, pkg-config, and a Yacc for building. tmux’s lightweight, single-screen architecture, extensive documentation, and cross-platform support make it a robust, standards-compliant solution for managing terminal workflows efficiently.
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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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