kitty

kitty is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator from Kovid Goyal (the same developer who built Calibre). GPLv3 licensed. Cross-platform across Linux and macOS. The point of the GPU acceleration is not just speed: it lets kitty render true-color graphics, ligatures, and even inline images and video without bolting on a separate protocol like sixel.

Install via your package manager or grab the binary from the project site. Configuration is a single text file at ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf. No GUI preferences panel, ever. Hot-reload works. Built-in features include tabs, multiple windows, layouts (splits without a multiplexer), keyboard-driven scrollback browsing, and a kittens system for small extensions like SSH session resume, image preview, and unicode picker.

Solo developers and power users get the most out of this. Teams: there is nothing to mandate or roll out, individuals pick their terminal. Free across every team size.

The catch is the config file. There is no settings UI and the defaults are minimal. You will spend a weekend tuning it the first time. Alacritty is faster on synthetic benchmarks but does less. WezTerm is the closest competitor on features. Pick kitty if you want graphics and ligatures in your terminal without a multiplexer layered on top.