Applications

audience all
level all
topic Mac
subtopic use

Download Mac Terminal Alternatives

Download and install a terminal for macOS. Mac terminals explained and reviewed. Compare Warp vs ITerm2 vs Alacritty vs WezTerm and others. Recommended terminal alternatives for macOS.

A terminal is a command-line interface (CLI) that allows you to interact with the operating system and run commands. The Mac Terminal application or console gives us access to the Unix command line, or shell.

A terminal application is essential for programming on a Mac. Even if you are not coding, a terminal gives you more power and choices on a Mac. In this article, you'll see popular terminal applications for macOS.

For more about the terminal and how to use it, see the article Mac Terminal.

Recommended Terminal for Mac

Apple includes the Mac terminal but I prefer Warp Terminal. Warp is an easy-to-use terminal application, with AI assistance to help you learn and remember terminal commands. Download Warp Terminal now; it's FREE and worth a try.

How to choose a terminal application

First, consider whether you are a beginner, an experienced developer, or a system administrator working with remote servers.

The Apple Terminal is most popular among beginners because it is pre-installed on macOS. However, it lacks the key feature that beginners need most: AI assistance to help you learn and remember terminal commands.

Newer terminal applications also offer "blocks" to organize commands and outputs into manageable sections, making it easier to locate and arrange specific tasks. Blocks are especially useful for beginners.

Beyond AI assistance, blocks, and speed, which benefit everyone, most of the alternatives to the Apple Terminal serve the needs of advanced users, either professional developers or system administrators.

Among professional developers, versatility in customization, especially colors and fonts, make advanced terminal applications popular for users who want to tweak the terminal for personalization or greater productivity.

For system administrators who work with remote servers everyday, productivity gains with tmux integration and multiple windows are even more important than customization.

List of Terminal applications

Some users call this "golden age of terminal apps in general and macOS-compatible ones in particular." Here are the most popular terminal applications for macOS.

Apple Terminal

Some users prefer the Mac Terminal for its simplicity and speed. For users with basic needs, the default Terminal is often sufficient. However, for beginners, the Mac Terminal lacks AI assistance, which can help you learn and remember terminal commands, and blocks, which can help you organize commands and outputs into manageable sections.

Warp Terminal

Warp Terminal is a terminal application written in Rust and GPU-accelerated for speed. It is known for its AI assistance, blocks, and unique collaboration features for teams. It's the most popular choice among newer, block-oriented terminal applications. Warp is a great choice for beginners and a popular choice among professional developers.

Wave

Wave is a new open-source, cross-platform terminal application, using Electron for rendering (a cross-platform framework). It integrates a text editor so you can edit files directly in the terminal and view images, Markdown and JSON. The interface has a sidebar for grouping terminal tabs in workspaces. The interface is based on blocks so you can organize commands and outputs into manageable sections. Wave is great for beginners, with blocks and AI assistance.

iTerm2

iTerm2 is the most popular classic terminal application for macOS among people who work all day with the terminal, with tmux integration and password management for system admins who work with remote servers. It's got incredible customization options with control over fonts and colors and a versatile interface with tabs and splits. On the other hand, for users new to the terminal, iTerm2's complex settings are disorganized and overwhelming, cementing its reputation as a tool with "everything including the kitchen sink -- if you can find it." It has an AI plugin but as an add-on it's not as well-integrated as the AI assistance in Warp Terminal. iTerm2 also falls short in speed and rendering efficiency compared to newer GPU-accelerated terminal applications written in Rust.

WezTerm

WezTerm is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated, open-source terminal emulator written in Rust by Wez Furlong. Searchable scrollback and a command palette are among its outstanding features, along with extensive customization using the Lua configuration language, and a versatile interface. It's popular among developers who like to customize and tweak their terminal for productivity.

Alacritty

Alacritty is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust (it's faster than iTerm2) with a minimalist design for terminal power users. It's got searchable scrollback. It is focused on speed (so no font ligature support or inline images) and suits system administrators.

Kitty

Kitty, for macOS or Linux, has been around for years and is known for its speed and its innovative graphics support, including display of images in the terminal, font ligature support, and tabs and splits. It's cross-platform and is popular among developers who want a fast terminal with advanced graphics support.

Tabby

Tabby (formerly Terminus) is a cross-platform terminal application, written in Electron. Users say it is slow, but strikes a balance of useful features without being overwhelming. It's more popular on Windows than on macOS.

Hyper

Hyper is a cross-platform terminal application, written in Electron using web technologies, making it easy to develop extensions. The use of Electron is probably the reason it's known to be sluggish and resource-intensive.

Terminator

Terminator is a cross-platform, open-source terminal application written in Java. Terminator is praised for its configurability, support for tabs and split windows, and overall usability, though it has some minor performance and feature-specific issues. It's not popular on macOS.

Rio

Rio is a cross-platform terminal application, written in Rust for speed. It's new and not yet well-known.

Ghostty

Ghostty, written in Zig and developed by Mitchell Hashimoto, is in private beta. Early users report it is very fast.

Extraterm

Extraterm is an open-source, cross-platform, terminal application, developed for a number of years by Simon Edwards.

ZOC

ZOC is a high-priced terminal application for macOS and Windows, that's not popular but has been around for years.

MacWise

MacWise is another high-priced terminal application, just for macOS, that's been around since 1996.

AI utilities for terminal applications

Shelly

Shelly is a utility that translates English into commands using OpenAI's GPT-4. It's an easy way to get AI assistance in any terminal application. You can install Shelly with Homebrew. Here's an example:

shelly 'git last 5 commits'
  $ "git log -5"

Terminal features for beginners

These features are especially useful for beginners.

AI assistance

AI assistance is a feature that helps you learn and remember terminal commands. It's especially useful for beginners who are new to the terminal and need help getting started. AI assistance can help you learn new commands, remember commands you've used before, and suggest commands based on your current context. It can also help you troubleshoot errors and find solutions to common problems.

Blocks

The traditional terminal offers a linear, or streamed, interface where the user types each command on a new line, and the output is displayed immediately below the input. Commands and their outputs follow a strict sequential flow. With a traditional terminal, there was scrolling but no selection with a mouse or copy-paste. Modern terminals support mouse selection and copy-paste but preserve the linear interface as a continuous stream of text.

Blocks are a recent innovation for a terminal user interface, leaving behind the linear interface to organize commands and their outputs into distinct "blocks." Blocks separate commands and their outputs into manageable sections, making it easier to locate and arrange specific tasks. The clear separation of commands and outputs improves readability, especially for complex tasks with multiple steps. Blocks can be reused, copied, and shared. Users can add notes and annotations to blocks, even sharing the blocks with others in some collaborative terminal applications. Even more important, blocks maintain their state, allowing users to revisit and modify commands and outputs as needed. Instead of scrolling back and copy-pasting to re-enter commands, users can reuse blocks, jumping back and forth among command sequences. Blocks are a significant improvement in terminal usability, especially for beginners.

Terminal features for advanced users

These features may be unfamilar to beginners.

Tmux support

Tmux is an open-source terminal multiplexer. It allows multiple terminal sessions to be accessed simultaneously in a single window. It is useful for running more than one command-line program at the same time. System administrators use it to keep processes running in the background, even after disconnecting in case of connectivity issues. Tmux is essential for operating servers remotely but not often used by beginners.

Ligature support

In typography, ligatures are special character combinations where two or more letters or symbols are combined into a single glyph to enhance readability and aesthetic appeal. For example, the character sequence = > can be displayed as a single glyph ⇒. Terminals that support ligatures can display these character combinations, making it easier to distinguish between similar-looking character combinations.

Using a terminal in VS Code or other editors

Many developers prefer to use a terminal within their code editor, such as Visual Studio Code, Zed, or Sublime Text. This allows them to run commands directly from the editor, without switching between applications. It also provides a more seamless workflow, as they can see the output of their commands alongside their code. Many code editors have built-in terminal support, allowing developers to open a terminal window within the editor. This terminal window behaves like a regular terminal, allowing developers to run commands, navigate directories, and perform other terminal tasks.

Drawbacks of using a terminal within a code editor include limited screen space, as the terminal window takes space away from writing code but is limited to a few lines of terminal code. Sometimes it's better to switch applications to maximize screen space for each.

A terminal in a code editor can be convenient for occasional terminal tasks, but many software developers prefer to customize a terminal application. Generally, system administrators and DevOps engineers prefer standalone terminal applications for their advanced features and customization options.

Other software you may need

It's good to know about other software tools you might use. In addition to Warp Terminal, I recommend:

To set up a development environment for programming, you can install:

What's next

My mac.install.guide is a trusted source of installation guides for professional developers. Take a look at the Mac Install Guide home page for tips and trends and see what to install next.