Open Source Terminals Tools

Open source terminals tools

projects 9 combined stars ★ 387K refresh nightly

Terminals is one of the most active slices of the open source world — the 8 projects below are ranked by GitHub stars, which makes this page roughly a community-voted shortlist rather than a vendor-curated catalogue. Every card shows the license and the last-commit date, so you can filter out the two failure modes of free software in one glance: restrictive licensing that blocks your use case, and abandonment that leaves you maintaining a fork. When two projects look comparable, prefer the one with more recent activity and the more permissive license (MIT/Apache-2.0 over AGPL) unless copyleft specifically serves your goals. Hover into any project for its full README — the documentation quality is usually the honest tell of engineering quality.

All Terminals tools

Alacritty ★ 66K

High-performance terminal with GPU acceleration

rank001 licenseApache-2.0 written inRust typeTerminals

Warp ★ 66K

A modern terminal built around AI coding agents

rank002 licenseAGPL-3.0 written inRust typeTerminals

Ghostty ★ 63K

Fast GPU-accelerated terminal with native UI design

rank003 licenseMIT written inZig typeTerminals

tmux ★ 50K

tmux source code

rank004 licenseISC written inC typeTerminals

Zellij ★ 36K

Organize terminal sessions with built-in layouts, tabs, and panes

rank005 licenseMIT written inRust typeTerminals

Kitty ★ 36K

GPU-accelerated terminal built for power users

rank006 licenseGPL-3.0 written inPython typeTerminals

WezTerm ★ 29K

GPU-accelerated terminal emulator with multiplexing across all platforms

rank007 licenseNOASSERTION written inRust typeTerminals

WaveTerm ★ 23K

Cross-platform terminal with AI built in

rank008 licenseApache-2.0 written inGo typeTerminals

iTerm 2 ★ 18K

Advanced terminal with modern features for Mac developers

rank009 licenseGPL-2.0 written inSwift typeTerminals

Frequently asked questions

How many open source Terminals tools are there?

This registry tracks 9 open source Terminals projects, with 387,090 combined GitHub stars. The list is ranked by stars and refreshed nightly.

What is the most popular open source Terminals project?

Alacritty leads this category with 66,108 GitHub stars, followed by Warp.

Are these Terminals tools free?

Yes — every project listed here is open source. Some also offer paid hosted versions alongside the free self-hosted option; the licence for each project is shown on its card.