Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Kitty – A modern, hackable, featureful, OpenGL based terminal emulator

If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based. - kovidgoyal/kitty

Kitty is a terminal emulator built on OpenGL, designed for developers who need a customizable command-line interface. It offers modern features and supports extensive customization through code modifications. The tool… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Kitty – A modern, hackable, featureful, OpenGL based terminal emulator launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal▲1,094
I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input). If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
My x86 emulator written in JavaScript▲765
Run KolibriOS, Linux or Windows 98 in your browser
2013 · copy.sh · its alternatives →
3AA
Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust▲1,170
Initial source-only release of Alacritty
2017 · blog.jwilm.io · its alternatives →
4
Ghostty▲161
A fast, feature-rich, and platform-native terminal emulator
2024 · ghostty.org · its alternatives →
5
Flox▲375
Hey Everyone! Ron here, part of the NixOS Foundation and building Flox. Just coming out of this years NixCon and pretty excited to show hn below :) As of today, NVIDIA officially recognizes Canonical, SUSE, CIQ, and Nix—via Flox—as supported distributors for CUDA. Full blog - https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/developers-can-now-get-cud... This is a huge win for the Nix community. For years, CUDA on Nix was possible but painful—builds could take hours, and redistributing prebuilt binaries was blocked by NVIDIA's licensing requirements. NVIDIA's growing engagement with key…
2024 · flox.dev · its alternatives →
6
OmniPTY – Opinionated terminal emulator for macOS and Linux▲15
Opinionated terminal emulator for macOS and Linux: splits, workspaces, file tree and prompt built in. GPU-rendered, written in Rust - omnipty-terminal/omnipty
4d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
7
Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours▲173
A serious terminal emulator with a stupid name. Contribute to pg83/shitty development by creating an account on GitHub.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Hyper 1.0.0▲413
Terminal built and extensible with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
2016 · hyper.is · its alternatives →
9
CryptoKitties▲400
Breed and collect adorable creatures using Ethereum
2017 · cryptokitties.co · its alternatives →
10
Screensavers for your terminal (Bevy/Ratatui)▲119
Screensavers for your terminal. Contribute to cxreiff/ttysvr development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
KittyRace▲103
Race CryptoKitties, win ETH
2018 · its alternatives →
12
Gridland: make terminal apps that also run in the browser▲111
Hi everyone, Gridland is a runtime + ShadCN UI registry that makes it possible to build terminal apps that run in the browser as well as the native terminal. This is useful for demoing TUIs so that users know what they're getting before they are invested enough to install them. And, tbh, it's also just super fun! Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times. We're…
Mar 2026 · gridland.io · its alternatives →
13
A cross-platform terminal emulator written in Java▲65
It's based on the jediterm library developed for IDEs, but it can also be put to work as a standalone terminal emulator with tabs. The library has been around for more than 10 years, but I don't think anyone made a terminal emulator app from it?
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Black Screen▲215
A terminal emulator with autocompletion based on Electron
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
Omni Terminal▲3
Your aperture to the universe: a GPU terminal in Rust
Aug 2026 · its alternatives →
16
Terminal Candy▲117
A native macOS terminal you can skin and theme
Aug 2026 · terminalcandy.com · its alternatives →
17
A terminal emulator in pure PHP▲196
A terminal renderer written in pure PHP. Contribute to soloterm/screen development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
18
Kitten Cannon▲97
Pet Kitty. Load Kitty into Cannon. Fire.
2016 · its alternatives →
19
Playnite▲69
Provides one unified interface for your PC games
2019 · playnite.link · its alternatives →
20
I built a handheld CHIP-8 game console to teach myself embedded systems▲128
A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
A game engine for the terminal in Go▲109
Terminal-based game engine for Go, built on top of Termbox - JoelOtter/termloop
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia▲198
We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing. Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia. Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon. Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
Feb 2026 · makie.org · its alternatives →
23
cmux - Ghostty-based terminal with vertical tabs and notifications▲198
I run a lot of Claude Code and Codex sessions in parallel. I was using Ghostty with a bunch of split panes, and relying on native macOS notifications to know when an agent needed me. But Claude Code's notification body is always just "Claude is waiting for your input" with no context, and with enough tabs open, I couldn't even read the titles anymore. I tried a few coding orchestrators but most of them were Electron/Tauri apps and the performance bugged me. I also just prefer the terminal since GUI orchestrators lock you into their workflow. So I built cmux as a native macOS app in…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Play SNES, gba, in your terminal, even in tmux▲6
rom is a ~5k-line C libretro frontend that plays games in the terminal. It renders native pixels with the kitty graphics protocol in Ghostty or kitty, inline! even in tmux! Nine platforms: SNES, NES, GB/GBC, GBA, Genesis, PC Engine, N64, Doom/Heretic/Hexen, Wolfenstein. macOS and Linux, MIT. https://github.com/jhickner/rom
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →