GNOME Terminal is a terminal emulation application that you can use to perform the following tasks:
- Access a UNIX shell in the GNOME environment.
- Run any application that is designed to run on VT102, VT220, and xterm.
GNOME Terminal emulates the xterm application developed by the X Consortium. In turn, the xterm application emulates the DEC VT102 terminal and also supports the DEC VT220 escape sequences. An escape sequence is a series of characters that starts with the Esc character. GNOME Terminal accepts all of the escape sequences that the VT102 and VT220 terminals use for functions such as to position the cursor and to clear the screen.
Key Features
- Multiple tabs.
- URL detection.
- Profiles support.
- Compositing.
- Real transparency.
- Emulates many of the escape sequences supported by xterm.
Website: help.gnome.org/users/gnome-terminal/stable
Support: Documentation
Developer: Guilherme de S. Pastore, Havoc Pennington, Mariano Suarez-Alvarez, Behdad Esfahbod, Christian Persch
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

GNOME Terminal is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal Emulators | |
|---|---|
| Tabby | (Terminus) Highly configurable terminal emulator, SSH and serial client |
| Alacritty | Hardware-accelerated terminal emulator |
| Wave Terminal | AI-native terminal built for seamless workflows |
| urxvt | RXVT-like terminal emulator with Unicode support |
| Kitty | Like Alacritty, Kitty offers hardware acceleration |
| Ghostty | Feature-rich and cross-platform terminal emulator |
| Guake | Drop-down terminal for GNOME |
| Terminator | Multiple GNOME terminals in one window |
| WezTerm | GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer |
| rio | Hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator |
| electerm | Terminal emulator and much more |
| st | Simple terminal implementation for X which sucks less |
| contour | Aimed at power users with a modern feature mindset |
| Zutty | High-end terminal emulator for low-end systems |
| xterm | Provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals |
| Extraterm | Swiss army chainsaw of terminal emulators |
| Tilda | Gtk based drop down terminal |
| Ptyxis | Terminal for a container-oriented desktop |
| MATE Terminal | Terminal emulator the MATE desktop environment |
| Hyper | Terminal emulator built with web technologies |
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| foot | Fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator |
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| Sakura | Vte-based terminal emulator |
| QTerminal | Lightweight Qt-based terminal emulator |
| Zashterminal | Modern, intuitive, and innovative terminal built with GTK4 and Adwaita |
| LazyCat Terminal | Built with Vala and GTK4. |
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| kermit | VTE-based, simple and froggy terminal emulator |
| ROXTerm | VTE terminal emulator with tabs |
| LXTerminal | Lightweight terminal emulator based on GTK+ for the LXDE desktop |
| Bobcat | Built using the U++ framework and TerminalCtrl widget |
| fortty | GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Fortran |
| Tess | Hackable, simple, rapid and beautiful terminal |
| mlterm | Multilingual terminal emulator on X11 |
| Termite | Keyboard-centric VTE-based terminal |
| Packet | Terminal multiplexer and broadcast system |
| fingerterm | Terminal emulator with a custom virtual keyboard |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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