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Foot is a minimalist terminal emulator for Wayland written in C.

Installation

Note
As of the time of writing, the Gentoo package for foot doesn't support pgo because of inconsistent/poor results, see bug #873625, in contrast with the upstream benchmarks.

USE flags

USE flags for gui-apps/foot Fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator

+grapheme-clustering	Enable grapheme clustering support
test	Enable dependencies and/or preparations necessary to run tests (usually controlled by FEATURES=test but can be toggled independently)
utempter	Enable utmp support via sys-libs/libutempter
verify-sig	Verify upstream signatures on distfiles

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2025-05-08 16:04 More information about USE flags

Emerge

root #emerge --ask gui-apps/foot

Configuration

Foot's user configuration is found at ~/.config/foot/foot.ini. The file and directory won't be created by default. A template can be found in /etc/xdg/foot/foot.ini or from the upstream repository.

Tip
Detailed information about all config parameters can be viewed with man foot.ini

To create the directory for the foot config and copy the example:

user $mkdir ~/.config/foot

user $cp /etc/xdg/foot/foot.ini .config/foot/foot.ini

Font/text configuration

Foot has several font configuration options, the font parameter can be used to set the terminal font. font-bold, font-italic, and font-bold-italic will automatically try to use variants of the primary font, but can be overridden. letter-spacing, horizontal-letter-offset, vertical-letter-offset, underline-offset, box-drawings-uses-font-glyphs, and dpi-aware options are also available.

FILE ~/.config/foot/foot.iniSet the font to 8pt Inconsolata

font=Inconsolata:size=8

Server mode configuration

Foot supports the operation of a daemon which can be used to reduce overhead. The server handles all wayland communication, VT parsing, and rendering. Additionally, fonts are cached in a single thread, reducing overall memory usage.

Warning
When using the daemon, all clients input and output are multiplexed on a single thread. If a single terminal is very busy, that could cause the rest of slow down as well, this can be mitigated by adding more worker threads. Additionally, if the server crashes all clients will crash.

FILE ~/.config/foot/foot.iniIncrease the number of worker threads to use for rendering

workers=32

Foot can be started as a server by running foot -s, this can be added to a window manager startup script to enable it upon login:

FILE ~/.config/sway/configStart Foot server with Sway if foot-client is the chosen terminal

set $term footclient
exec foot -s

Once the server has been started, clients can be started with footclient.

Warning
If the configuration file has been updated, the server must be restarted before the configuration is reloaded, this will end all client sessions.

Scrollback configuration

The number of lines saved in the scrollback can be adjusted with:

FILE ~/.config/foot/configIncrease the scrollback length to 16384

[scrollback]
lines=16384

FILE ~/.config/foot/configShow scrollback positions as a percentage

[scrollback]
indicator-format=percentage

Note
Foot will automatically round the lines value up to the nearest power of 2

Color configuration

Colors can be specified with the foreground, background, regular{0-7}, and bright{0-7} parameters.

The order is Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Magenta, Cyan, White.

FILE ~/.config/foot/foot.iniDark+

[colors]
foreground=cccccc
background=1e1e1e

regular0=000000 # black
regular1=cd3131 # red
regular2=0dbc79 # green
regular3=e5e510 # yellow
regular4=2472c8 # blue
regular5=bc3fbc # magenta
regular6=11a8cd # cyan
regular7=e5e5e5 # white

bright0=666666 # bright black
bright1=f14c4c # bright red
bright2=23d18b # bright green
bright3=f5f543 # bright yellow
bright4=3b8eea # bright blue
bright5=d670d6 # bright magenta
bright6=29b8db # bright cyan
bright7=e5e5e5 # bright white

Example Configuration

Minimal Configuration

FILE ~/.config/foot/foot.iniFoot minimal configuration

font=Source Code Pro:size=10
initial-window-size-chars=190x60

This minimal configuration sets the font to Source Code Pro with a size of 10. The window will open with 60, 190 character long, lines. All configuration options can be found on foot's source repository.

Removal

Unmerge

root #emerge --ask --depclean --verbose gui-apps/foot

Troubleshooting

Terminal break after SSHing

If a SSH connection is made to a destination that does not have the foot terminfo files [1]. This can be corrected in more than one way.

SSH with TERM set

This can be done multiple ways, by running export TERM=xterm-256color once logged in, or starting the SSH session like TERM=xterm-256color ssh

user $TERM=xterm-256color ssh larry@server

Install terminfo files on destination

This is very distro-dependent, but this info should be part of the sys-libs/ncurses:

root #emerge --ask sys-libs/ncurses

See also

• List of software for Wayland — various desktop related packages for Wayland
• Terminal emulator — emulates a video terminal within another display architecture (e.g. in X).
• Wayland — a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture with the aim to be easier to develop, extend, and maintain

External resources

• foot's official installation guide