TeraTerm is an open source free software terminal emulator (communication program) for MS-Windows. It emulates different types of terminals, from VT100 till VT382 and supports Telnet, SSH1, SSH2 and Serial Port connections. It also has built in Macro scripting language and the set of useful plugins.

The first versions of TeraTerm were created by T. Teranishi from Japan. At the time it was one of the only freely available terminal emulator effectively supporting Japanese language. Development of TeraTerm stopped in the late 1990s at version 2.3. In 2002 Ayera Technologies released TeraTerm Pro 3.1.3 supporting SSH2, however Ayera Technologies neither made their source open, nor provided technical support.

In 2004 Yutaka Hirata, a software designer from Japan, restarted development of the open source version of TeraTerm. He added his own implementation of SSH2 and lots of new features on top of what was part of version 2.3. A complete list of them is published on TeraTerm Support forum.

To avoid confusion with version numbers and to indicate that TeraTerm developed by Yutaka is more recent than version 3.1.3 from Ayera Technologies, it was decided to give this branch of TeraTerm version numbers starting 4.xx.

In January 2005, Boris Maisuradze together with Yutaka Hirata started the TeraTerm Support forum where they answer questions from TeraTerm users. Posting in this forum is the best way to suggest new features for TeraTerm or propose new commands for the TeraTerm Macro language.

Since 2007, TeraTerm is maintained by TeraTerm Project (Japanese Developer) team as open source software.

The latest versions of TeraTerm are compatible with OS Windows 98 and later and are available for downloading from the Download section of this web site. The source code on the application can be downloaded from TeraTerm Project pages on SourceForge.jp.