Contour

About

Contour is a modern, modal, virtual terminal emulator aimed at everyday use and power users with a modern feature mindset. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows, and uses GPU-accelerated rendering. Its feature list includes font ligature support (such as Fira Code), Unicode support for emoji and grapheme clusters, terminal tabs, bold and italic fonts, high-DPI support, and runtime configuration reload.

For productivity, Contour offers Vi-like input modes for selection and copy-and-paste, vertical line markers for jumping through history, key binding customization, color schemes, and profiles that group color scheme, login shell, and related behaviors. Its daemon mode keeps sessions running in a background process so they survive the window, can be reattached locally or over the network, and interoperate with tmux, though the page labels this feature experimental. Contour is configured through a contour.yml file in $HOME/.config/contour, and some features require shell integration.

Contour is installable from several Linux distribution repositories, Flathub, and release builds including a macOS bundle and a Windows installer. It requires a recent operating system, a GPU supporting at least OpenGL 3.3, and an x86-64 or ARMv8 CPU with the relevant crypto extensions.