KDE gets Kwi, a new GPU-rendered terminal emulator built on libghostty-vt
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readA KDE developer announced on 1 November a new terminal emulator for Plasma and other free desktops, called Kwi and pronounced kwee. The name comes from gwisin, a romanised form of the Korean word for ghost, which is also why its icon is a small terminal ghost.
Kwi takes its terminal parsing and state from libghostty-vt, the headless library published by the Ghostty project, and builds the rest on KDE Frameworks such as KPty. Rendering goes through the Qt Scene Graph with Vulkan or OpenGL, and the interface uses Kirigami. That is the main difference from Konsole, which is tied to the older QWidget stack and renders on the CPU. The author reports 3x to 35x faster results than Konsole depending on the benchmark, including 870 frames per second against 23 in one test, and expects lower battery use as well.
The post presents Kwi as young: its feature set is narrower than Konsole's and is meant to grow slowly, following KDE's interface guidelines. The underlying library has not yet made an ABI and API stability promise; the post expects a stable 1.0 in the next four to six months.
What it means
Kwi is not a replacement for Konsole today, and the announcement does not claim to be. What it shows is a second desktop project building on libghostty-vt rather than writing its own terminal core, which is the model that library was designed for.