Terminology is a fast, lean and visually enhanced open source terminal emulator.
Terminology is the terminal emulator from the Enlightenment desktop environment. It was designed to use EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) and push the boundaries of what a modern terminal emulator should be.
Terminology has the main functionality of any terminal emulator including support for backgrounds, themes for layout and design, multiple tabs, block text selection, link handling, preview icons for files, support for X11 and Wayland etc.
Key Features
- Tab support with live thumbnail content.
- Themes for layout and design.
- Custom background support. Backgrounds can be bitmap, scalable vector graphics, animated gif, or even a video.
- Bitmap fonts support.
- Command mode commands.
- URL, file path and email address detection and link-handling.
- Text reflow.
- Audio keyboard.
- 256-colors support.
- Cool visual bell.
- Inline display of link content.
- Fraktur support.
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Works in X11, Wayland and in the Linux framebuffer.
Website: www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Carsten Haitzler and various contributors
License: 2-clause BSD license
Terminology 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. |