List of features

Main Features

Available on all 4 major platforms, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Windows.
GPU-accelerated rendering.
Terminal tabs and split panes, with colored tabs, tab badges and drag-and-drop rearranging of panes and tabs
Layouts: named sets of tabs and panes that open together
Native window chrome on Windows 11, macOS and Linux, in light and dark, with a Settings window, a command palette and a character-cell Terminal style
Persistent sessions that survive the window (daemon mode) — reattach locally or over the network, and interoperate with tmux in both directions
Font ligatures support (very useful for programming and scripting)
Unicode: Emoji support (-: 🌈 💝 😛 👪 - including ZWJ, VS15, VS16 emoji :-)
Unicode: Grapheme cluster support
Bold and italic fonts
Nerd Fonts glyphs (Powerline, Font Awesome, Material Design, Devicons, ...) with whichever font you choose: a symbols font is bundled
High-DPI support.
Vi-like input modes for improved navigation, selection and copy'n'paste experience
Hint mode for keyboard-driven selection of URLs, file paths, git hashes, and more
Drag and drop: drop a tab on a pane edge to split it, or files to type their escaped paths
Clickable links: URLs, file paths and your own patterns in whatever a program prints, opened with Ctrl+click
A find bar with a live match count, floating over the pane being searched
Control API and the contour ls, new, split, send, pane capture and block commands to script the daemon's windows, tabs, panes and command blocks
MCP server (contour mcp): coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex split panes, run commands and read their output in their own tab
Sandboxed WebAssembly status-line extensions
Quick terminal: a global hotkey slides a terminal down from the top of the screen
Vertical Line Markers (quickly jump to markers in your history!)
Command blocks: an exit-status gutter, line numbers, per-line timestamps, folding, scrollbar marks and a sticky command header
Restored sessions: history comes back above a "Restored" divider, with one toast saying what was restored
Offer to install shell integration for bash, zsh and fish, showing the one line it adds, also in Settings
Notifications when a long-running command finishes in a tab you are not looking at
Shell integration for bash, zsh, fish, tcsh and PowerShell
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 (via SM ? 2026 / RM ? 2026)
Text reflow (configurable via SM ? 2028 / RM ? 2028)
Clickable hyperlinks via OSC 8
Clipboard setting via OSC 52
Sixel Image support
ReGIS vector graphics
Terminal page buffer capture VT extension to quickly extract contents.
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 statusline support
Size indicator on resize