Foot is a minimal Wayland-native terminal emulator for Linux that focuses on speed and simplicity. A hidden gem worth exploring.

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It's Foss

Foot is a Wayland-native terminal emulator that has been around for years but remains relatively unknown. Unlike older terminals retrofitted for Wayland, Foot was built for it from the start. Key features include Sixel image support for displaying real images in the terminal, scrollback search via Ctrl+Shift+R, keyboard-driven URL detection, and a server-daemon mode that reduces memory usage and startup time by hosting multiple windows in one process. Installation is straightforward via standard package managers on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Configuration lives at ~/.config/foot/foot.ini and supports shell switching, font customization, and theme inclusion — with a walkthrough for applying the Catppuccin Mocha theme.

Foot: The Wayland Terminal Most Linux Users Don’t Know About

Foot is great. No GPU acceleration and is head-to-head with the big three (alacritty,kitty,ghostty) with a smaller memory footprint.
It does have some issues like slowdown while running TUI-heavy apps (my experience is with opencode) for long periods of time in a terminal. It’s especially annoying if you’re running in server mode as launching new terminals becomes terribly slow.
That said, it is a must-have on a low-resource machine for sure.