Ptyxis is a terminal for GNOME with first-class support for containers.
Flatpak is the intended and preferred distribution mechanism.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Built-in support for profiles allows for many of those preferences to be tweaked on a more fine-grained basis.
- Specify a default container per-profile or to inherit the current terminal’s container.
- Flatpak’able without losing features! This works through the use of a specialized ptyxis-agent that runs on the host to provide Ptyxis the ability to create PTY devices which integrate better with containers.
- A number of palettes are provided with native support for light/dark mode and can update with your desktop style preference.
- Due to how ptyxis-agent works, it can perform various foreground process tracking for things like sudo or SSH without significant overhead. This requires some improvements in various container systems which is in the process of merging at the time of writing.
- Tab overview using modern libadwaita features.
- Transparency support does exist but must be tweaked manually using GSettings until better transitions can be implemented in libadwaita.
- Use of libadwaita “Toasts” to notify the user when the clipboard has been updated as well as other operations.
- Various tweaks to how VTE draws which are performed by rewriting the retained render tree. This allows for appropriate padding around the terminal while still keeping scrollback from looking cut off.
- User customizable keyboard shortcuts.
- “Single application mode” allows you to run an application in a ptyxis instance but just for that command. Useful when integrating with .desktop files containing Terminal=true.
- Pinned tab profile/container/directory are saved across sessions so that you can get back to your projects quickly. Currently this is restricted to a single window but may change in the future.
- ptyxis-agent will automatically create systemd scopes for your tab when available to help reduce the chances that the whole app would be killed by the OOM killer instead of the tab taking up resources.
- An terminal inspector to help you debug issues when writing applications for the terminal.
- There are situations where users have particular needs for integrating with external systems. Preferences allow for tweaking a number of these compatibility options.
Website: gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis
Support:
Developer: Christian Hergert
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Ptyxis 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 |
| GNOME Terminal | Terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop environment |
| foot | Fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator |
| Xfce Terminal | Lightweight and easy to use terminal emulator application |
| Tilix | Advanced GTK3 tiling emulator |
| Terminology | Fast, lean and visually enhanced open source terminal emulator |
| Konsole | The KDE 5 terminal emulator |
| Black Box | GTK 4 terminal |
| Yakuake | Drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology |
| Station | Convergent terminal emulator |
| 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. |
| Kerminal | Modern terminal emulator and SSH manager |
| Termy | Minimal terminal emulator |
| DomTerm | Terminal emulator, REPL console, and screen multiplexer |
| CRT | Visually expressive terminal emulator written in Rust |
| 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.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

