KDE developer Eike Hein has introduced Kwi, a new experimental terminal emulator for KDE Plasma and other Linux desktops, with GPU-accelerated rendering and the Ghostty terminal library at its core.
Unlike the long-established Konsole terminal emulator, which relies on Qt’s older QWidget framework and CPU-based rendering, Kwi uses Qt Quick and the Qt Scene Graph to take advantage of GPU acceleration through Vulkan or OpenGL. Its interface is built with Kirigami, following KDE’s latest Human Interface Guidelines.
Under the hood, Kwi uses libghostty-vt, the terminal library developed as part of the Ghostty project. This handles terminal parsing and state management, allowing Kwi’s development to focus on desktop integration, rendering performance, and the user interface.
According to Hein, Kwi delivers between 3 and 35 times faster performance than Konsole, depending on the benchmark, and the GPU-based approach is expected to reduce battery consumption.
In addition, Kwi introduces several terminal-rendering improvements. These include better handling of Wayland fractional scaling, text ligatures, Nerd Font icons, Powerline symbols, and complex text decorations. It supports KDE Plasma’s system color schemes, including changes applied while the terminal is running.
For modern terminal protocols, Kwi offers a more complete and faster implementation of the Kitty image protocol, including image animations and parent-relative placement. It also improves support for Kitty keyboard and mouse cursor protocols, clipboard integration, and terminal progress reporting.
For existing Konsole users, Kwi supports Konsole color scheme files. However, switching embedded terminal components in applications currently requires a code change, and a more convenient mechanism still needs to be developed.
Despite these capabilities, Hein emphasizes that Kwi is still in early development. The project has undergone limited testing, and its first 0.1 release has not yet been tagged. Users should expect bugs and missing functionality compared to Konsole’s mature feature set.
Importantly, Kwi is not an announcement that KDE intends to replace Konsole. Hein describes it as an experiment and a proposal, offering users another terminal option rather than establishing a new official direction for KDE.
Those interested in testing it can find the source code on KDE Invent. The project provides nightly Flatpak builds, with installation instructions in the repository’s README. For additional details, see the announcement.
