Contour For Linux

All Linux distributions come with pre-installed Terminal apps, or to be more precise terminal emulator apps. While most of them appeal to the large majority of users, there are third-party alternatives with some unique features, improved user experience, or all-round better looks.

Contour is one such third-party terminal emulator app (works on Windows, macOS, and most Linux distros) that, quite frankly, has a lot going for it. To quote its official GitHub repository, it's "a modern and actually fast, modal, virtual terminal emulator for everyday use."

It's clearly aimed at power users who want a bit more out of their terminal emulators. And when we say "a bit more," we actually mean "a lot."

We already mentioned this, the fact that Contour works on all major OSes out there such as Windows, macOS, and Linux, but it also works on FreeBSD.

When it comes to features, there's a lot to unpack. Contour comes with GPU-accelerated rendering, High-DPI support, Font ligatures support, Unicode and emoji support (including ZWJ, VS15, and VS16 emojis), bold and italic fonts, vertical line markers (allows you to quickly jump to markers in your command history), and Vi-like input modes (improved selection, as well as Vi-like scrolloff feature and improved copy-paste experience).

If you're running the app on Windows 10/11 or KDE, you also get some cool blurred/transparency effects for the backgrounds. Contour also boasts "blurrable" background image support, runtime configuration reload, 256-color and truecolor support, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts, various color schemes, and even profiles (allows you to group customize color schemes, login shell, and all related behaviors).

Not quite. Contour also boasts synchronized rendering and text reflow (configurable via SM ? 2026 / RM ? 2026), clickable hyperlinks via OSC 8, advanced clipboard settings via OSC 52, sixel inline images, and terminal page buffer capture VT extension (useful for quick content extraction).

The terminal emulator also provides a built-in Fira Code-inspired progress bar, a read-only mode (useful for protecting against accidental user-input), and VT320 host-programmable and indicator status line support, and a few more little features.

Contour is without a doubt, a very impressive bit of kit, especially when compared to most basic Terminal emulators most Linux distributions provide by default.

For more information regarding how to configure the app, as well as how to install or build it from source, make sure to check out the app's official GitHub repository.