Meet Kwi (pronounced “kwee”), a new GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that follows the latest KDE HIG and UI conventions, built on the libghostty-vt library from the Ghostty project, Kirigami, and KDE Frameworks. Compared to Konsole, KDE’s venerable terminal emulator, Kwi promises up to 35x faster performance that should reduce battery usage.
The main reason for building Kwi, according to the developer, is Konsole’s tech stack, which is tied to the older QWidget UI toolkit and renders on the CPU, while newer KDE software, including Plasma itself, uses Qt Quick with GPU acceleration. Kwi follows the newer approach, with a renderer powered by the Qt Scene Graph that runs on Vulkan or OpenGL.
