Alternatives to COSMIC Terminal
The terminal emulator for the COSMIC desktop, with GPU rendering, ligatures and bidirectional text. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
COSMIC Terminal
The terminal emulator for the COSMIC desktop, with GPU rendering, ligatures and bidirectional text.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as COSMIC Terminal.
Alacritty
A deliberately minimal OpenGL terminal that leaves multiplexing and tabs to other programs and just draws text fast.
Alacritty provides the terminal emulation core COSMIC Terminal builds on, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, but has no tabs by design.
GNOME Console
A simple, user-friendly terminal emulator that is the default terminal on newer GNOME desktops.
GNOME Console is the simple default terminal on newer GNOME desktops, with far fewer customization options and no mention of GPU rendering or ligatures.
Ghostty
A GPU-accelerated terminal that uses the real native interface of the platform instead of drawing its own.
Ghostty is a GPU-accelerated terminal with native window chrome on macOS and Linux and thorough emulation, configured through a single text file.
kitty
GPU-accelerated terminal with tabs, splits, graphics and a kitten scripting system.
kitty adds GPU rendering with tabs, splits, inline images and kitten scripts on macOS and Linux, configured only through a text file.
WezTerm
A GPU-accelerated terminal that is also a multiplexer, configured in Lua and the same on every platform.
WezTerm is a GPU-accelerated terminal with a built-in multiplexer and Lua configuration that works the same on Windows, macOS and Linux.
GNOME Terminal
The long-standing VTE-based terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop on Linux.
GNOME Terminal is the long-standing VTE-based GNOME terminal, well integrated with the desktop but with a more conservative feature set than newer terminals.
Konsole
KDE's terminal emulator for running a command shell, with tabs, profiles, bookmarks and output search.
Konsole is KDE's full-featured terminal with tabs, profiles and output search, designed around KDE Plasma rather than the COSMIC desktop.
foot
A fast, lightweight and minimalistic terminal emulator built for Wayland on Linux and FreeBSD.
foot is a fast, minimal Wayland-only terminal for Linux and FreeBSD, lighter on resources but without tabs.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
tmux
Keeps terminal sessions alive on a server after you disconnect, and splits one window into many.
Zellij
A terminal multiplexer that tells you its own shortcuts on screen, so you can use it on day one.
Nerd Fonts
A collection of programming fonts patched with thousands of icons, plus a patcher for adding them to other fonts.
Gogh
A collection of hundreds of terminal color schemes, installed into your terminal with a single command.
Starship
A shell prompt that shows the git branch, language version and other context, configured once and working in every shell.
