7 Free Terminal Tools and Emulators to Boost Development Productivity

I'm in a similar situation. I've been using Fig for a little while but Warp has caught my attention. I think I'll keep my current setup but it's cool to see the innovation in the terminal space.

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment!

Deactivated User4y ago

GREAT!

Muzamil Abbasi4y ago

Thank you just installed fig its amazing.

Alyssa Holland4y ago

Awesome! Happy to hear that you are liking Fig!

Peter Merritt4y ago

Very interesting article. Thank you!

Alyssa Holland4y ago

Thanks for reading!

Rehan Sattar 4y ago

I have used a few of them and found them useful though. But for me, I'm most productive in Tilix + Fish shell combination.

Alyssa Holland4y ago

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment! I haven't heard of Tilix before but I'll have to check it out.

Neeraj4y ago

Tabby is 🔥🔥. Been using it for more than 2 months and it definitely improves your productivity.

Alyssa Holland4y ago

Thanks for reading and leaving a comment! I only recently learned about Tabby and it does seem really cool. I'll have to give it a try sometime.

Eleftheria Batsou4y ago

Oh yes!! I learned something new today! Thank you for compiling this list Alyssa Holland :)

Alyssa Holland4y ago

Thanks for reading and happy to hear that you learned something new!

Top Lists to Boost Development Productivity

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The Productive Dev

65 posts

Welcome to my blog 👋🏽 I'm a Front-End Developer with a passion for learning!

I write about Programming 👩🏽‍💻 and Productivity Tips ✔️

The terminal has been around for decades and is an essential part of a developer's toolbox. Interestingly, I've noticed that there have been a ton of new tools and emulators popping up into the terminal ecosystem. It has been exciting to see that the terminal is still getting some love even after all these years. This list will contain the top terminal tools and emulators ranging from the battle-tested veterans to the new kids on the block.

1) Fig 🍐

Fig is the only item on this list that is not an emulator. Instead, it integrates with other popular terminals by adding autocompletion. As you type, Fig will display options, subcommands, and contextually relevant arguments in your existing terminal. However, with the announcement of a plugin store and dotfiles management, it seems like Fig's feature set will continue to grow over time.

Keep your eyes peeled for future updates 👀

Demo of Figs visual autocomplete in a terminal

🌐 Check out Fig

2) Warp 🌪

According to the Warp homepage:

Warp is a blazingly fast, rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app.

Some particularly interesting features include, blocks which makes the interactions feel more like a text-editor than a terminal, and command-lookup which makes finding previous and commonly used commands a breeze.

Image from Warp's GitHub page

🌐 Check out Warp

3) Hyper ⚡

Hyper is created by the team at Vercel and has been around for a little while now. Hyper is an Electron-based terminal that is built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is fully extensible and gives you the ability to install custom themes and plugins straight from the command line.

A collection of hyper themes.png Collection of hyper themes from Hyper's Blog page

🌐 Check out Hyper

4) iTerm2 💾

iTerm2 is the O.G. of terminal emulators. Like many of the other items on this list, it's open-sourced and provides a ton of features that allow power users to customize to their heart's content.

Image from iTerm2

🌐 Check out iTerm2

5) Alacritty 🛰

According to the Alacritty homepage:

Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator that comes with sensible defaults, but allows for extensive configuration. By integrating with other applications, rather than reimplementing their functionality, it manages to provide a flexible set of features with high performance. The supported platforms currently consist of BSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.

Alacritty Example Image.png Image from Alacritty

🌐 Check out Alacritty

6) kitty 😺

Kitty is a the fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulator. The code in kitty is designed to be simple, modular, and hackable and is written in a mix of C and Python. Kitty is designed for power keyboard users and provides access to all its controls via the keyboard.

kitty logo

🌐 Check out Kitty

7) Tabby 🗂

According to Tabby's GitHub description:

Tabby (formerly Terminus) is a highly configurable terminal emulator, SSH and serial client for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Features include:

Theming and color schemes
Fully configurable shortcuts
Split panes
Proper shell experience on Windows including tab completion

Image from Tabby's GitHub page

🌐 Check out Tabby

El Fin 👋🏽

Thanks for reading and I hope you found some new items to add to your terminal toolbox 🧰

If you enjoy what you read, feel free to like this article or subscribe to my newsletter, where I write about programming and productivity tips.

As always, thank you for reading, and happy coding!

Command Palette

Comments (9)

Top Lists to Boost Development Productivity

My Developer Toolbox 🧰

More from this blog

1) Fig 🍐

2) Warp 🌪

3) Hyper ⚡

4) iTerm2 💾

5) Alacritty 🛰

6) kitty 😺

7) Tabby 🗂

El Fin 👋🏽