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The Best Free Standalone Terminals for Windows 10 (2020)

Adnan Mostafa on August 11, 2019

If you are anyone that has tried to use a terminal on PC, I am sorry for your suffering. Below are some of the best terminal emulators that can up ...
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cadams profile image
Chad Adams

github.com/microsoft/terminal

Should be on the list. Considering this is windows terminals and this is Microsoft's new open source terminal.

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Adnan Mostafa

I just saw this on Reddit the other day, and saw a bunch of mixed reviews on it. Currently, trying it out to see how it is!

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Chad Adams

It's an early preview, it will get much better.

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it11841231 profile image
It

well, then, when it got better, it should enter the list of "best windows terminals"
no?

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khanaza2 • Edited

This also should be considered.
IVT Secure Access: ivtssh.nl/
It has a lot of elegant features.
Single sign-on: Support for GSSAPI allows password-less login using SSH or Telnet with your Windows credentials. It has many ways to login without the need for typing passwords.

Quick search like “Spotlight”: Just press 1-2 characters of the server name to quickly select the server to connect. It is far better than the tedious job of going through the saved list of saved sessions manually.

Automatically highlight warning and error messages on screen. Red for "error, failed", yellow for "warnings" and green for "success, passed". This is great when running something that produces a lot of output on the screen. The colored text is very difficult to miss. More keywords can also be added to have them highlighted by default.

Automatically logs all sessions to a file name that is displayed on the screen. The list can be accessed with a keyboard short cut and each listing can be clicked to open the corresponding file in default editor. This eliminates the need to open the file and search for different warnings and errors manually after a big verbose script that also logs.

Mouse Support. Any filename on screen listed with an error message can be directly clicked with mouse to open it in default editor. IVT can even generate VI commands to allow positioning of the cursor with the mouse within this popular Unix editor. The user can program a combination of keyboard and mouse keys to trigger a user-defined script.

Built-in WinSCP support, drag & drop file transfer The terminal has built-in WinSCP support and function like "start WinSCP to this host, send the file to this server, send the file to windows host", that does not require any extra logging step. Alternatively, drop a file on the terminal window and it will be transferred to the host.

Tabbed window support The terminal supports the tabs in a single window and easy navigation keys “CTRL + arrows”.

Each tab has a progress indicator. The terminal has a progress indicator on each tab for the session they represent. A grey moving clock for showing terminal is still running the last command. A green "checked" box for command completed. This eliminates the need to go to different sessions to check the completion of a long-running command.

VT220 compatibility: IVT scores 110 out of 110 on the vttest compatibility test. The highest rating found for PuTTY is 82, which means various older programs that require exact emulation will work with IVT and fail with PuTTY.

Supports traditional search It also supports "CTRL-F" with which you can search for something on-screen and history buffer in upwards/downwards direction.

Run command simultaneously on every logged-in session. If you have to run something on every "logged-in session", like an update, build, etc., the terminal has a capability to run the same command on every logged-in terminal and after it is started, the progress indicators on each tab will show the status of that command on every machine.

Color schemesThe terminal has many color-schemes built-in that fulfill the coloring need for everyone.

Launch Duplicate session with keyboard shortcuts. The launched session is the exact duplicate of the session it duplicates (same host, user, and working directory).

Map actions/scripts to keyboard keys: The default setting of the terminal is good enough for everybody but it can be customized to use each and every keyboard shortcut to run scripts/tasks and that means that doing some specific things on different servers is just a keyboard key press away.

X-Server: The terminal can be easily integrated with X-server.

Configurable: It has literally hundreds of configurable options, which allow IVT to be customized to fit any given situation or environment. Scripts can dynamically change all settings to configure sessions automatically.

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Mr_Json

I did'nt know about this option. I will check it out, thank you very much.

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Frederic R.

On windows I just wanted a power shell with tabs and found consoleZ which I prefer over cmder. github.com/cbucher/console Hyper.is looks cool but I don't want an electron app as my default terminal

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Omri Gabay

Fluent Terminal's actually kinda cool; didn't know about it, so thanks.

Regardless, all of these terminals still fall short of the mark. In SSH, none of them support mouse commands. I know not everyone cares about that, but I still like using the mouse with Tmux and I can't do that while SSH'd in to my virtual machine with ANY of these terminals, except for MinTTY. Using MinTTY with Git for Windows has been solid for me, even though it's a tad laggy at times.

Not as bad as Hyper terminal though... ugh

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Dave Follett

I wish Git Bash had tabs 😢

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Omri Gabay

Me too, but until then Tmux is our saving grace

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krishna kakade

the thing is i am searching for terminal since couple of months and didn't no about the Terminus and i seen many times that used in article but know i am using it thanks to you .Your Appreciated ❤🐱‍🏍😊🔧

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Himujjal Upadhyaya • Edited

You can update this blog and provide a way to install all of this. Chocolatey commands should be more than enough.

Example:

gsudo choco install cmdermini
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Awesome list BTW.

My preference:
Newer Windows 10: Windows Terminal (probably the best terminal emulator ever built (irrespective of OS))
Older Windows: Cmder-mini

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cortes profile image
cortes-
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bataillec

I used MobXterm for years since I worked only from Windows client to Unix server. It never lets me down ! ;)

mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

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Ronaldo Peres

Nice,

I only knew the Cmder, but I think it is slow.

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Ahmet Çadırcı

Link is wrong in Alacritty

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Adnan Mostafa

Thank you! Fixed the issue!

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iamkneel

The only thing that's keeping me from switching to Alacritty is that they don't support font ligatures... yet.

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Jeklah

Why, oh why, wasn't Babun on this list?!

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Omri Gabay

Babun's dead dude