foot

Fast, lightweight and minimalistic terminal emulator made for Wayland on Linux.

Verified facts: 3 of 3
Alternatives ranked: 4
Approved reviews: 0
Visits sent from here: 0

About foot

foot is a terminal emulator written in C by Daniel Eklöf specifically for Wayland compositors such as Sway, Hyprland and river. It does not support X11, which lets it stay small and fast, and it renders on the CPU with careful damage tracking so only changed cells are redrawn. A server mode lets one background process host many terminal windows, cutting memory use and startup time to almost nothing. Despite its minimalism it supports true colour, font fallback and ligature-free shaping of complex scripts, Sixel images, URL hints, scrollback search and a configuration file with many options. It is free and MIT licensed, packaged by most Linux distributions and hosted on Codeberg. There are no tabs or splits, which are expected to come from the compositor or a multiplexer, and it is of no use outside Wayland.

Best for: Wayland users on tiling compositors who want a tiny, fast terminal.

What works

Very low memory use, especially in server mode
Fast startup and rendering
Sixel image support

Why people leave

Wayland only, no X11, macOS or Windows
No tabs or splits
Configuration is file-only

Top foot alternatives

See all 4

1
Alacritty
Similarly minimal, but also runs on X11, macOS and Windows.
66.5
2
kitty
Adds tabs, layouts and a graphics protocol with GPU rendering.
62.6
3
Ghostty
Native GTK terminal with tabs and splits on Wayland and X11.
59.6
4
WezTerm
Feature-rich cross-platform terminal with a multiplexer.
57.2

Why people left foot

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foot: common questions

Is foot free?

Yes. foot is free, open-source software.

Is foot open source?

Yes.

What platforms does foot run on?

foot is available for Linux.

What are the best alternatives to foot?

The highest-ranked foot alternatives right now are Alacritty, kitty and Ghostty. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.

See all 4 foot alternatives