KDE developer Eike Hein announced the development of Kwi, a new terminal emulator intended to be fast and modern while complying with KDE HIG and UI conventions. The project uses Ghostty's libghostty-vt library along with other mature KDE Frameworks. Kwi supports GPU acceleration through OpenGL or Vulkan using the Qt Scene Graph.
Kwi is described as offering 3x to 35x faster overall performance than Konsole, depending on the benchmark. One cited example is 870 fps in DOOM-fire-zig on a test system, compared with 23 fps in Konsole. The project is also positioned as having a more modern architecture than Konsole and as complying with the latest KDE HIG standards.
Kwi is currently experimental and has not been proposed as a replacement for Konsole. According to the announcement, development is well underway and the software has seen limited testing by a small circle of friends, but there is not yet a tagged v0.1.0 release. Hein cautioned that expectations should be tempered and that obvious and immediate bugs should be expected. He also noted that Kwi is in no way a match for the 29 years of continuous development work on Konsole, which is used by millions every day.
Those interested in learning more about the Kwi terminal emulator can do so via the KDE.org blog.
Sources: Phoronix.