Contour vs Hyper

Contour is a free terminal emulator for everyday use, designed for people who want control over terminal workflows. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows. GPU-accelerated rendering and high-DPI support accompany text features such as font ligatures, Unicode grapheme clusters, and colored emoji. Users can split panes, use vi-like modes for navigation and selection, and jump through history with vertical markers. Sessions can persist beyond a terminal window and be reattached locally or over a network. Contour interoperates with tmux control mode in both directions, but not its -CC mode. It also supports clickable links, inline Sixel images, OSC 52 clipboard setting, and profiles for color schemes and login shells. TCP connections use TLS encryption and require a token. Daemon mode is experimental, and its command-line flags and wire protocol may change. The project website remains in draft mode. Contour is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Hyper is a free terminal application for people working in a command-line interface. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with split panes, GPU acceleration, SSH support, and a scripting API. The project says speed and stability are priorities and uses xterm.js as its terminal engine. Users can configure the shell, environment variables, appearance, window size, scrollback, and other settings in .hyper.js, and change command bindings there as well. Themes and extensions provide additional ways to alter or intercept terminal behavior. Extensions are Node.js modules available on npm; the API lets plugins work with React components and Redux actions. Plugins can be reloaded with Command+R, and Hyper also loads them periodically or after plugin configuration changes. Downloads are listed for macOS, Windows, Debian, Fedora, and AppImage. The displayed latest version is v3.4.1.