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Terminals

Terminal emulators for macOS, split into two groups: general-purpose emulators, and the newer wave of workspaces that organize shells by project and are built for running several CLI agents side by side. Most of the general-purpose ones install via brew install --cask <name>.

Agent and project workspaces

Section titled “Agent and project workspaces”
  • Okena — native terminal multiplexer in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering on GPUI (the framework behind Zed), built for running multiple CLI agents such as Claude Code across projects; resizable project columns side by side, session restore of terminals, agents and layouts, git branch tracking and worktree management, keyboard-first controls; macOS, Linux and Windows, open source (MIT), installed by shell script or from source via Cargo
  • cmux — macOS terminal built on libghostty (used as a library, not a Ghostty fork) for managing multiple AI coding agents; vertical tabs showing git branch, working directory and ports, split panes, notification rings for processes needing attention, a scriptable embedded browser and a CLI/socket API; works with any terminal-runnable agent, open source (GPL), iOS companion app in beta
  • Kero — native macOS workspace that wraps the shell in project context: projects sidebar (Cmd+1–9), persistent tabs and split panes restored on relaunch, a git panel with staging, commits and inline diffs, a file browser with syntax-highlighted editing, and browser panes for previewing local servers; agent-aware, so coding agents can delegate and coordinate work across panes; GPU terminals via Ghostty or Alacritty backends, macOS 15.6+, no telemetry, open source (GPL-3.0) — brew install egoist/tap/kero
  • ShellBoard — terminal workspace that organizes shells by project instead of a flat tab list; color-coded project groups, session restore including splits, pane sizes, working directories and scrollback, live git status, broadcast input to every pane, command palette and global search across output; built on Tauri 2 rather than Electron, works with zsh, bash, fish and nu; macOS 13+, Linux and Windows 10+, free with source on GitHub; from Prague-based Calmbit
  • Warp — started as an AI-assisted terminal with command blocks and a command palette, now positioned as an agentic development environment: the terminal itself is open source (AGPL-3.0, Rust), alongside a standalone Agent CLI and Factories for orchestrating fleets of agents from triage to a mergeable PR; MCP support and integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Linear and Jira; macOS, Linux and Windows, Factories require a platform account

General-purpose emulators

Section titled “General-purpose emulators”
  • Ghostty — GPU-accelerated terminal in Zig with platform-native UI, ligatures and image protocol support; macOS 13+ as a universal binary plus Linux, open source (MIT). Its rendering core libghostty is reused by cmux, Kero and rootshell
  • iTerm2 — long-standing Terminal replacement with split panes, search, autocomplete, paste history and deep customization; version 3.7 (September 2026) added tab groups, a companion iOS app and a Claude Code integration, on top of built-in AI chat with configurable OpenAI-compatible providers (Ollama, OpenRouter, z.ai, Qwen, MiniMax); macOS 13+, open source
  • Kitty — GPU-accelerated terminal with ligatures, image support and a tiling window system; highly configurable via a plain-text config, open source (GPL-3.0), macOS 12+
  • Alacritty — minimal OpenGL-accelerated terminal in Rust focused purely on performance and simplicity, leaving tabs and splits to a multiplexer; cross-platform, open source (Apache-2.0)
  • WezTerm — GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal and multiplexer in Rust with ligatures and Lua-based configuration; the last tagged stable release is from February 2024, with development since then distributed as nightly builds
  • Hyper — terminal built on web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) with a plugin and theme ecosystem; open source (MIT), but the last release (3.4.1) dates to January 2023
  • rootshell — Metal-accelerated terminal for iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro and Mac, rendered through libghostty; integrated SSH with hardware security key support, Mosh-compatible roaming, QUIC/KCP transport and post-quantum cryptography, native Git CLI via libgit2, Vim 9, Helix and tmux control mode, screen sharing over HEVC, plus a built-in AI chat and voice agent; free, open source (MIT)

Terminals aimed primarily at orchestrating agents rather than at being a shell live in Coding Agent Tools.