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Top 23 Terminal Open-Source Projects
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ohmyzsh
🙃 A delightful community-driven (with 2,500+ contributors) framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 300+ optional plugins (rails, git, macOS, hub, docker, homebrew, node, php, python, etc), 140+ themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
Project mention: Show HN: MiniPCs.zip (charting the pareto frontier of MiniPCs) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-25so I guess you would also support killing another TLD with a common filetype:
https://ohmyz.sh
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
>I doubt that people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem
Did you forget Microsoft engineering response to Casey Muratori "Extremely slow performance when processing virtual terminal sequences"?
"I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively."
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
followed by Casey producing evidence for his 'extremely simple' claim in couple of days.
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Project mention: Displaying a crafted file in Tabby terminal can run shell commands | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-18
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Ligatures are a renderer issue, so using alacritty as a lib wouldn't have this issue (it does demonstrate their hardline stance). Another example that would translate is how long it took them to support disambiguation of key combinations: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/6378 (2019-2023). Of course, the maintainers are free to do whatever they want with the project - but such things do make alacritty-as-a-lib an exceptionally bad choice for situations where you want things to just work.
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tldr is perfect when man pages are too detailed and you only need the common examples.
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Project mention: Warp goes open source, betting agents and community can outpace closed rivals | dev.to | 2026-07-05
OpenAI is a founding sponsor of the new Warp repo on GitHub, with Warp’s agent workflows powered by GPT models.
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But for reading code, scripts, configs, Markdown, YAML, JSON, or anything where your eyes are expected to survive the experience, bat is much nicer.
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termux-app
Termux - a terminal emulator application for Android OS extendible by variety of packages.
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Terminal Web (py_terminal) is a powerful terminal-based UI web project utilizing Python and the Rich library for beautiful terminal output combined with advanced command execution capabilities.
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Project mention: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-11
Or Terminal is already a full featured web browser?
https://hyper.is/
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Project mention: Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-27
I know that if you want `fd` (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) you need to `apt install fd-find` and which installs the binary `fdfind` (!).
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For that specific use case you could also try `yazi`[0], which is a TUI file browser that has image (and other filetypes) preview built in.
[0] https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi
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httpie
🥧 HTTPie CLI — modern, user-friendly command-line HTTP client for the API era. JSON support, colors, sessions, downloads, plugins & more. (by httpie)
httpie is easier to read than curl when testing APIs manually.
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textual
Lean TUI application framework for Python. Build sophisticated terminal user interfaces with a simple Python API. Run your apps in the terminal and a web browser.
Project mention: [type='CNAME'] crashed my Textual TUI: why escaping user text isn't enough | dev.to | 2026-06-28That front end is a terminal UI built with Textual and Rich. It lists incoming messages and renders the selected one as a chat bubble. The catch is that the message bodies are not clean strings I wrote. They are whatever a session decided to send: shell output, stack traces, Terraform plans, ticket IDs. The TUI has to render arbitrary text from outside my control. That is the detail that turned out to matter.
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https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/
If you're already a tmux expert then zellij is probably no big deal, and the "written in rust" part is more of a red-herring than the headline.
Firstly, it doesn't conflict with Ctrl-A by default (but I think that's actually `screen`), second it has mouse support, floating window, saved layouts, stacked tabs, session picker/manager, and take a look at the configuration mechanism: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/main/zellij-utils/...
...for some reason it's just feels "super-sensible", comfortable, and allows a lot of flexibility.
The concept of "booting layouts" (a very poor-man's `docker compose` ;-) is really interesting and powerful:
https://zellij.dev/documentation/layouts.html
https://zellij.dev/documentation/creating-a-layout.html
...and I've got like a total of like 1.5hrs of zellij usage under my belt.
I've never been one to be super attached to screen/tmux, tried out byobu... none of them clicked in the same way with power, ease, and flexibility that zellij felt like it provided right away.
Again: this may be telling a vim user about the power of emacs, in which case just nod and smile and go about your day, but since these terminal multiplexers are effectively "just UX", then a "slightly different UX" may end up being in actuality the whole compelling product!
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10. fish shell
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kitty
If you live in the terminal, kitty is made for you! Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based.
Terminal: I use Kitty. I have tabs, splits, clipboard bindings, quick access terminal, and a few custom keybindings. It is fast, it works well on Wayland, and it does not get in my way.
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glance
Glances an Eye on your system. A top/htop alternative for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS and Windows operating systems.
Project mention: Glances is a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-23 -
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Terminal discussion
Terminal related posts
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Show HN: RepoFleet – manage issues that span multiple Git repositories
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Eternal Terminal v7.0.0
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Show HN: Shellular – run Claude Code/Codex/Pi from your phone
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Tired of re-recording my README demo GIF by hand, I turned the whole demo environment into code
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I gave my agent a skill so it stops asking where my files are
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Warp goes open source, betting agents and community can outpace closed rivals
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Show HN: Mcpsnoop – Wireshark for MCP (transparent proxy and live TUI)
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 11 Jul 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Terminal projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ohmyzsh | 188,614 |
| 2 | Windows Terminal | 103,812 |
| 3 | lazygit | 80,000 |
| 4 | Tabby | 73,135 |
| 5 | alacritty | 64,758 |
| 6 | tldr | 63,028 |
| 7 | warp | 62,814 |
| 8 | bat | 59,563 |
| 9 | termux-app | 57,209 |
| 10 | rich | 56,766 |
| 11 | hyperterm | 44,637 |
| 12 | fd | 43,599 |
| 13 | cheat.sh | 41,529 |
| 14 | yazi | 40,144 |
| 15 | httpie | 38,198 |
| 16 | textual | 36,470 |
| 17 | CodeWhale | 35,037 |
| 18 | zellij | 34,182 |
| 19 | fish-shell | 33,792 |
| 20 | kitty | 33,726 |
| 21 | glance | 33,071 |
| 22 | modern-unix | 32,930 |
| 23 | tqdm | 31,228 |
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