KDE developer Eike Hein announced Kwi, a new terminal emulator built on Ghostty’s libghostty-vt library plus KDE Frameworks, Phoronix reports.
The pitch
- GPU acceleration through OpenGL or Vulkan via the Qt Scene Graph
- Follows the current KDE HIG
- “3x–35x faster overall performance, depending on the benchmark,” e.g. 870 fps in DOOM-fire-zig on a test system vs. 23 fps in Konsole
It’s experimental. There isn’t even a tagged v0.1.0, and it is not being proposed as a Konsole replacement. Hein’s words: “please greatly temper your expectations and expect obvious and immediate bugs.”
My take
libghostty showing up inside other projects is exactly what Ghostty’s library split was for. Worth watching, not daily-driving yet.
Review before you install: read the release notes yourself, back up your config, and try new versions somewhere you can afford to break first.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
