The app adds curvature to the screen, as well as scan lines, jitter, a glow effect, and more. Instead, it aims to make your terminal look straight out of the days when computer screens had two colors: green and black.Ĭathode doesn’t stop at giant green letters and numbers on a black screen. This app doesn’t add the functionality that some of the other terminal apps on this list do. If you miss the old days when computers were much bigger, Cathode might be for you. It’s handy if something went wrong, and you want to double-check the steps you went through to reproduce the problem. This auto-generates logs of all your terminal sessions. This automatically inserts the file name as text, which can be useful.Īnother feature is Terminator’s automatic logging. One such feature is its drag-and-drop support, which lets you drag and drop a folder or file from Finder into the terminal window. Terminator has been around for years and offers some features you won’t find in other terminal apps. You still can, but its developers hope that it will work for you out of the box. While other apps on this list are extremely configurable and customizable, Alacritty aims for sane defaults so you don’t have to configure it. That means scrolling through long screens looks much smoother than many other apps. AlacrittyĪlacritty’s GitHub page describes it as a “terminal emulator with a strong focus on simplicity and performance.” Performance is the key word here, as unlike a lot of terminal apps, Alacritty uses your graphics card to accelerate its performance. The hyperpower plugin simply adds screen-shake and particle effects to your terminal, making everything you type look more impressive. The hyper-search plugin adds a search function similar to iTerm2, while hypercwd opens new tabs in the same directory as your current tab. Looking at the list of plugins and themes, you’ll see tons of options available.
The app has a decent feature set out of the gate, but its plugin system is what makes it powerful.
Hyper is written in JavaScript and uses this language for plugins. One of the more recent additions to the list of terminal apps available for the Mac, Hyper is ultra-customizable. If you frequently paste items into your terminal, the built-in paste history will also prove to be very handy. Another key iTerm2 feature is built-in search, which makes poring over pages-long log files much easier.
While the Mac Terminal app supports tabs (which iTerm2 does as well), split panes let you keep a better eye on what you’re working on. One of the main features iTerm2 supports is split panes.