KDE developer unveils Kwi, a GPU-accelerated terminal built on Ghostty
Eike Hein's experimental project pairs Ghostty's libghostty-vt library with Qt Quick/Kirigami for a faster alternative to Konsole.
What to know
- Kwi is a new experimental KDE terminal built on Ghostty's libghostty-vt library and rendered via Qt Quick/Kirigami with GPU acceleration (Vulkan/OpenGL), unlike CPU-rendered Konsole.
- Claimed performance gains of 3-35x over Konsole depending on benchmark, with expected battery savings from GPU rendering.
- Explicitly framed as an experiment and proposal, not an official replacement for Konsole; no 0.1 release has been tagged yet and it lacks Konsole's mature feature set.
- Available now via nightly Flatpak builds and source on KDE Invent for early testing.
Eike Hein KDE developer, creator of KwiGhostty project Upstream terminal library provider
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump posts
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Linuxiac details Kwi's features and clarifies it's not a Konsole replacement
Linuxiac's coverage summarized Kwi's technical advantages — Wayland fractional scaling, Kitty image/keyboard protocols, Konsole color-scheme compatibility — and noted the project is still untagged at version 0.1, calling it an experiment and proposal rather than an official new direction for KDE.
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You're obviously entitled to your own opinions on where your bar is for "vibe coded," but I started the project years before "vibe coding" was a thing, and I've carefully cared for and hand-coded the entire architecture that libghostty-vt is built on over years of dedicated, volunteer work. And along the way being helped by other real humans…
2 more of the top 3 · 69 posts in this stretch
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RE: https:// floss.social/@9to5linux/117539 623198444522 The vision to finally have a native # QtQuick terminal emulator with # Kwi is already something, but being based on # libghostty has me really excited. # Linux # qt # kde # konsole
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Possibly off-topic, but a fun fact from a native Korean speaker: > This is also how it came to bear its name: *kwisin*, or more typically *gwisin*, is a romanized form of *귀신*—Korean for ghost. It's pronounced a little bit like *kwee-shin*. The word is Sino-Korean, written [鬼神] in Chinese characters. The hanja corresponding to Kwi, the name of…
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Eike Hein announces Kwi terminal emulator for KDE
Hein published a KDE blog post introducing Kwi, a new terminal built on Ghostty's libghostty-vt library, Qt Quick/Kirigami UI, and GPU-accelerated rendering via Vulkan or OpenGL, positioned as a modern alternative to Konsole.
“the product vision for Kwi is to be kind of unexciting: Just what you want and expect out of a KDE Plasma terminal.”
— Eike Hein -
first by Phoronix, 10d ago
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Meet Kwi, a New Ghostty-Based GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator for # KDE Plasma https:// 9to5linux.com/kwi-is-a-new-gho stty-based-gpu-accelerated-terminal-emulator-for-kde-plasma # Linux # OpenSource # FreeSoftware # FOSS
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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Even before I clicked on it, I wished it to be ghostty and it was ghostty. Looks great!
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You can disable the menu bar and all toolbars, which I do, and then it looks slim. I'm not sure why the context menu is an annoyance though. But Konsole is slooooow. I switched to Kitty a while ago and the difference is palpable. Looking forward to testing this Kwi option because it'd be nice to have something more KDE-native.
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What people are saying 18 voices from 2 sites · best of 73 · verbatim
- Nov 2
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It's hard to imagine what "slop" is supposed to mean if it can be applied to some of the highest-quality software written in decades.
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> You are the one who has thrown away years of work, years of manual labour by loads of people, by turning it into slop Those years of work haven’t been thrown away. I’m using Ghostty today. I love it. I’ve never looked at the source code for it because I’ve honestly never encountered a bug as far as I know. It’s obviously, as a user, software…
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I don't really understand how someone who works in technology and has probably not only embraced technology but created it for the better part of their life decides to just bury their head in the sand on this next iteration of technology. Whats the next step for you? Refuse to use any software that has AI-assisted code? Might has well give up…
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Maybe I'm misreading/misunderstanding, but I find it interesting you don't as strongly dismiss Linux wholly as a "vibe coded kernel," according to your principles I've come to understand above. Does it follow that its maintainers have thrown away decades of manual labor by thousands of people and disrespected their contributors, too? That's how…
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Ya know, this AI hype goes both ways. One can use a bit of assistance on grunt work without losing understanding if they have discipline. Discipline is definitely possible; currently not aware of evidence to dismiss mitchell and co’s work.
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Honestly as someone who probably largely agrees with you I think this anger is misplaced and counterproductive. In the current period of insanity about AI, I have seen mitchellh moving the conversation in the direction of being more careful and not just using a firehose of generated code. That's a good thing. I question what publicly insulting him…
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I'm happy you're using other terminal emulators. That doesn't bother me. Thank you for explaining your value system to me. Interesting goalposts. Thank you.
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Your disappointment itself is not insulting to me. It is the blanket dismissal of the entire project. You can be disappointed in me, you can call my code slop if you want, etc. but its insulting to dismiss the years of work everyone has done that wasn't AI at all, just because some part of it was touched with AI. I obviously don't agree with your…
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I wonder what your thoughts are on the legality of LLM output? I'm thinking of papers like this one, https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3, that find up to 2% of LLM output is "strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations". > It's hugely insulting to me and others who have worked hard to produce [high quality libraries] with…
- Nov 1
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Personally I would say that it’s just something you have to experience, similar to high refresh rate monitors. Obviously a slow terminal and a 60Hz display are _fine_, but for me personally, once you experience the smoother version, it recontextualises the ordinary version. It’s not a big enough difference that I would give up important features…
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I use Konsole. When would I notice slowness, that a GPU offloading terminal emulator would know how to avoid? I poke around the system, I edit files here and there, I build some software packages (AUR and Debian). I can't say I've been blown away by stuttering screens or anything. Am I misunderstanding where the speed increase is? Or is my pc just…
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Kwi Is a New Ghostty-Based GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator for KDE Plasma https:// lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_l ink.php?rid=368697
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The article literally says: > Please also don't mistake Kwi as some kind of announcement of the future KDE direction I you want to believe that Konsole is getting discontinued soon, you may choose so but you might be alone.
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Hopefully not anytime soon. I love Konsole and I hope it'll live on forever. But, IIRC their original orange site post mentioned this is possible avenue of reducing KDE's maintenance burden. Maybe long term, is Kwi proves to be good enough it'll take over the default terminal role. The winds are flowing in that direction. Konsole is a codebase few…
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So the terminal with the best Unicode support out of sixel-supporting ones is getting discontinued soon? (Konsole supports sixel, Ghostty doesn't and won't)
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Kwi Is a New KDE Terminal Emulator Built on Ghostty Technology https:// linuxiac.com/kde-introduces-kw i-a-new-gpu-accelerated-terminal-powered-by-ghostty/
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Very cool to see modernisation of the KDE terminal emulator! The interface looks great and uncluttered compared to the Konsole default, while still having everything needed. I've used Konsole years ago when I first moved to KDE, but quickly switched to Kitty as the former has some weirdness around font rendering (specifically, the braille…
- Oct 31
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Sounds great. Konsole is ok but not my favorite due to its cluttered interface, specifically the toolbar and context menu. The lack of toolbar and speed is welcome, let’s see how the rest pans out.