ghostty

Ghostty is a fast, native terminal emulator with GPU acceleration. macOS gets SwiftUI and Metal rendering; Linux gets GTK with optional systemd integration. It nails standards compliance (Kitty graphics, image protocols, synchronized rendering) while keeping legacy xterm sequences working.

Free, MIT-licensed, no setup beyond installing. Multi-window, tabs, splits with customization, and a multi-threaded architecture (one read, write, and render thread per terminal). Performance is in Alacritty territory, around 100x faster than the old defaults, but with a real native UI instead of a bare config file.

This is the right pick if you've used Alacritty and missed the polish, or used iTerm2 and missed the speed. Solo: free and worth installing. Small teams: free. Large teams: free.

The catch: no Windows yet, and the project deliberately has not added Ghostty-specific terminal sequences. If you want a wild new feature, you wait. If you want a terminal that just works, you don't.