Terminal Emulator Tier List

Summary

Slacks compares eight Linux terminal emulators, weighing speed, features, customization, and intended audience. The rankings reflect the speaker’s personal opinions.

Tier Terminal Main points S Ghostty A newer, Wayland-native terminal with GPU acceleration, Kitty-protocol image rendering, built-in tabs and splits, and fast startup. Its plugin support is currently limited, though the speaker expects it to grow. S Kitty The speaker’s daily-use terminal. It offers GPU acceleration, strong image rendering through the Kitty graphics protocol, tabs and splits, and a mature plugin ecosystem called Kittens. A Alacritty GPU-accelerated, very fast, bare-bones, and available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It lacks built-in tabs and image rendering; the speaker notes these can be handled with tools such as tmux or separate image viewers. A Foot A lightweight, Wayland-native terminal that avoids the compatibility overhead the speaker associates with X11-oriented terminals running on Wayland. GPU support is limited, and performance may depend on hardware. B Suckless Terminal Extremely small—around 2,000 lines of C code—and highly customizable through source-code patches that users apply and compile themselves. It has very few features by default and is aimed at experienced users comfortable with C. C Konsole KDE’s default terminal, with tabs, splits, profiles, extensive UI customization, strong mouse support, and limited image rendering via the Kitty graphics protocol. The speaker criticizes its lack of GPU acceleration and relatively heavy resource use. D GNOME Terminal Comes with GNOME and supports tabs and splits, but the speaker faults it for lacking image rendering and GPU acceleration, as well as being slow, clunky, and limited in customization. Not assigned a tier in the subtitles Warp An AI-focused, feature-rich terminal with multiple cursors, Vim bindings, easy color customization, command explanations on hover, autocorrect, tabs, splits, and collaboration features. The speaker says it requires an account, has heavy telemetry, and is best suited to beginners; its account and pricing model are presented as drawbacks.

The video also explains that Wayland is replacing the older X11 display system and argues that terminals designed for X11 may incur extra overhead when run through a compatibility layer on Wayland. It is a comparative review rather than a step-by-step guide.

Main speaker/source: Slacks, the video’s host and reviewer.