Software · Consoles, homebrew & emulation

Contour Terminal Emulator

Contour is a modern and actually fast, modal, virtual terminal emulator, for everyday use.

Completely free
Linux
Open source

Overview

Contour Terminal Emulator is a console and retro computer emulator, available on Linux.

Features described in its Flathub listing: hardware acceleration.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information

“Contour is a modern and actually fast, modal, virtual terminal emulator, for everyday use” — Flathub, 10 November 2026
“GPU-accelerated rendering.” — Flathub, 10 November 2026

At a glance

Contour Terminal Emulator is completely free: it is open source software, and every feature is available without paying or subscribing.

Its licence (Apache-2.0) is a permissive open source licence: use, modification and redistribution are allowed, including in commercial projects.

Strengths

Open source code
Commercial use allowed

About

Contour is a modern and actually fast, modal, virtual terminal emulator, for everyday use. It is aiming for power users with a modern feature mindset. Available on all major platforms, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows. GPU-accelerated rendering. Font ligatures support (such as in Fira Code). Unicode: Emoji support (-: 🌈 💝 😛 👪 - including ZWJ, VS15, VS16 emoji :-) Unicode: Grapheme cluster support Bold and italic fonts High-DPI support. Vertical Line Markers (quickly jump to markers in your history!) Vi-like input modes for improved selection and copy'n'paste experience and Vi-like scrolloff feature. Blurred behind transparent background when using Windows 10 or KDE window manager on Linux. Blurrable Background image support. Runtime configuration reload 256-color and Truecolor support Key binding customization Color Schemes Profiles (grouped customization of: color scheme, login shell, and related behaviors) Synchronized rendering Text reflow (configurable via SM ? 2028 / RM ? 2028) Clickable hyperlinks via OSC 8 Clipboard setting via OSC 52 Sixel inline images Terminal page buffer capture VT extension Builtin Fira Code inspired progress bar support. Read-only mode, protecting against accidental user-input to the running application, such as Ctrl+C. VT320 Host-programmable and Indicator status line support. Size indicator on resize. and much more ...

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) — 10 November 2026
Last technical check: 6 November 2026
Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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