Tera Term

Tera Term is one of the most versatile terminal emulators on the market today. While it first got its start in the early 1990s, it's since gained an ardent community of followers and became an open-source project after years of inactivity. Today, Tera Term can emulate a robust variety of different computer terminals, and it continues to receive updates that expand both the terminals it can emulate and its core stability. Given its popularity, Tera Term will likely continue to receive support for a long time to come.

If any of that terminology sounded confusing to you, Tera Term won't necessarily make sense to you right from the start, but its interface makes it easy to get onboarded with what Tera Term can do. It uses a clean and stripped back UI so you won't have to puzzle through poorly-sketched icons or dig through deep layers of menus. But what you can do is solid. Most of the major file transfer protocols are supported, and there's emulation for most of the major terminals.

That's largely it for Tera Term. It's a specialized tool that's highly competent at its specialization, and it sports a clean and easy-to-understand interface. Tera Term users do get access to a full macro scripting language for automation that's easy to implement, and there are some plug-ins as well. That may make it less immediately appealing than other terminal emulators, but the high utility, reliability, and open-source design transform it into one of the most dependable choices around.