Best Terminal Emulators

ZOC is professional terminal emulation software for Windows and macOS. Its impressive list of emulations and powerful features makes it a reliable and elegant tool that connects you to hosts and mainframes via secure shell, telnet, serial cable, and other methods of communication. With its modern user interface, this terminal has many ways of making your life easier. In its own way, ZOC is the Swiss army knife of terminal emulators, versatile, robust, and proven. Tabbed sessions with thumbnails, address book with folders and color-coded hosts, highly customizable to meet your preferences and needs, scripting language with over 200 commands, compatible with Windows 10/11 and macOS 12 Monterey, and administrator friendly (deployment, configuration). Extensive logging, full keyboard remapping, scrollback. User-defined buttons, automatic actions, macro recorder. Emulations are xterm, VT220, TN3270, TN5250, Wyse, QNX.

Powerful replacement for macOS Terminal, supporting 24-bit color, standard graphics protocols and iTerm2 image sequences and color schemes. MacTerm is one of the few emulators in the world that allow terminal-based programs to set up to 8 bits per RGB component (for a total of 24 bits), allowing for a large number and large spectrum of colors on the screen. The terminal is capable of preserving incoming text perfectly: whether you copy it to the Clipboard, capture it to a file, print it, or drag and drop, any special characters will be present. You can also use the floating command line window to input any kind of character. (In 4.1.0, there are limits on which Unicode characters can actually be displayed by the terminal; these limitations are being removed in 5.0.) Finally, Unicode is supported for file names, preference collection names, and macros.

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration to deliver speed, features, and familiarity without compromise. Ghostty provides fully standards-compliant emulation, drawing on ECMA-48 and xterm conventions, to ensure compatibility with existing shells and software, while its multi-renderer architecture leverages OpenGL (with ligature support) to sustain smooth rendering up to 60 fps under heavy load and minimal I/O jitter via a dedicated I/O thread. It offers modern windowing capabilities such as multi-window, tabbing, and splits, and embraces native platform experiences through SwiftUI and GTK4, all built atop a shared core written in Zig (“libghostty”) that can be embedded via a C API. Users benefit from basic customizability (fonts, backgrounds, colors), an opt-in feature set for interactive CLI tools, and performance competitive with leading terminal emulators.

WezTerm is a high-performance, cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer built in Rust that delivers GPU-accelerated rendering, including ligatures, color emoji, true color, dynamic color schemes, and hyperlinks, and modern windowing controls such as panes, tabs, and multiple windows on both local and remote hosts. Its single-process multiplexer provides scrollback, searchable history, mouse integration, Quick Select mode for rapid selection, Copy mode, shell integration, support for the iTerm image protocol, SSH connectivity, serial ports, Arduino devices, and workspace/session management via Lua-configurable scripts. Configuration is handled through a wezterm.lua file with hot-reload support, while a rich command-line interface (wezterm cli) lets you spawn programs, manipulate tabs and panes, and set domains. WezTerm adheres to ECMA-48 and xterm conventions for full ANSI/ISO compliance and offers native UI integration using platform-specific APIs.

StayLinked enables you to migrate to state-of-the-art devices, measure and optimize productivity with cutting-edge business intelligence, and interface with ground-breaking technologies in the areas of automation, robotics, augmented reality, and location-based services. Keeping employees on the job is a key part of productivity. The architecture of traditional terminal emulation solutions often leads to erratic application connectivity and performance. This results in end users spending time troubleshooting issues with the help desk rather than performing important application tasks. By eliminating dropped or lost sessions, providing centralized application configuration and management, and delivering highly efficient help desk tools, StayLinked keeps applications and end users running at peak performance. StayLinked Terminal Emulation (TE) is the fastest TE solution available for mobile devices. Traditional terminal emulation products send all telnet/SSH traffic to the mobile device.

Rocket® Passport terminal emulation solutions includes Rocket Passport Web to Host® and Rocket Passport PC to Host. Rocket Passport Web to Host software is a feature-rich, browser-based IBM® 3270 emulator for host access, which can significantly reduce costs for organizations using other desktop terminal emulators. Passport Web to Host includes both enhanced IBM TN3270E emulation and basic TN3270 emulation, as well as IBM® i (TN5250), UNIX/DEC (VT), and secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP). With Passport Web to Host, remote or distributed Windows users get all the tools they need for secure, reliable, productive host connectivity. This includes support for SSL and SSH security, VB Script for macro development, HLLAPI and an Object API for IBM application integration, comprehensive Windows cut-and-paste, and more. Passport PC to Host gives Windows users all the tools they need to create secure, reliable, productive host connectivity.

Flynet Viewer™ TE (Terminal Emulation) provides a browser based, terminal emulator to access key business systems. Access Mainframe, iSeries, Unix, VMS or MultiValue systems, on any device with zero client software. The terminal emulator is installed in a server environment, either on-premise or in the cloud, and centrally managed via the Flynet Viewer administration centre. Flynet Viewer works on all browsers and devices with no Java or ActiveX plugins. Flynet Viewer has all the features you would expect in an enterprise terminal emulator, including client and server-side macro creation, file transfer, single sign-on, MFA and keyboard remapping. Flynet Viewer Terminal Emulation provides the same level of functionality that is associated with a full fat desktop Terminal Emulation client but is delivered over the web and served up via a browser. Flynet Viewer Terminal Emulation will run on any device regardless of operating system or indigenous browser.

HostAccess is PC terminal emulation software. It offers a suite of terminal emulation tools for Microsoft Windows users. This allows secure access to various platforms, including Linux, Unix, IBM, Windows, etc. The main usage of the HostAccess is to connect to PICK (multivalue) system, such as UniVerse, UniData, D3, ONware, etc., and use own package of programs written in PICK Basic. These programs provide APIs for data exchange and expansive GUI capabilities. Produce reports quickly and integrate data with Windows applications. Connect to multiple systems within one integrated environment. HostAccess offers all the key terminal emulation software features you need in a single page. So, whether you’re looking for asynchronous/synchronous connections, server-based administration, concurrent users, or multiple session access, HostAccess is an ideal solution for you.

Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology. Smoothly rolls down from the top of your screen. Tabbed interface, configurable dimensions and animation speed, skinnable, sophisticated D-Bus interface. After Yakuake has started you can click on configure Yakuake by clicking on the Open Menu button (middle button on the bottom right hand side of the interface) and select Configure Shortcuts to change the hotkey to drop/retract the terminal automatically, by default it is set to F12. While most configuration options can be changed from Yakuake GUI, there are some options only accessible from modifying the configuration file. Yakuake allows to control itself at runtime by sending the D-Bus messages. Thus it can be used to start Yakuake in a user defined session. You can create tabs, assign names for them and also ask to run any specific command in any opened tab or just to show/hide Yakuake window.

Time-Tested Emulator of choice by Global Mainframe Customers. Extend mission critical terminal applications to the web, mobile or as APIs without touching the existing application. HCL ZIE for Transformation extends mission-critical terminal applications to the web, mobile, or as standard SOAP or RESTful web services without touching the existing application. No rewriting, refactoring, or access to application source code is required. Reduce training costs, increase end user productivity with improved navigation and usability, and eliminate data entry errors. ZIE for Transformation tunable default rendering and screen customization get all the screens of your existing application rendered with a new, intuitive user interface. Deploy apps to web, portal, and Eclipse RCP runtime environments, and allow access by a large variety of web browsers, including mobile.

Turbosoft's terminal emulation software supports over 80 different emulations for systems such as IBM, HP, OpenVMS, Unix, HP NonStop, Unisys, Wyse & more. Choose from TTerm Connect, our web-based HTML5 offering, TTWin4 for Windows desktops, TTerm for Linux, or, for developers integrating terminal emulation, TTerm for .NET. TTerm Connect, our web-based terminal emulator offers flexible, powerful terminal emulation with nothing more than a web browser. TTerm Connect offers all the features you would expect from a desktop terminal emulator in a lightweight web application. Centrally configured and managed, TTerm Connect requires no client-side installation and can be deployed with its own web client or integrated with your existing website. Any host, any device. Available for any modern web browser and client device and with options for Windows or Linux based servers. Flexible & capable of servicing the terminal emulation needs of thousands of concurrent users.