Kwi, KDE's new terminal, claims 3x-35x Konsole speedup

KDE developer Eike Hein announced Kwi on November 1, 2026, a new terminal emulator for the KDE Plasma desktop. It draws on the GPU and, in his tests, runs 3 to 35 times faster than Konsole. It is built on libghostty-vt, a library from the Ghostty terminal project, and nightly Flatpak builds are already available. Hein calls it "an experiment and a proposal," not a replacement for KDE's 29-year-old default terminal.

What Kwi is

Kwi is "a modern and fast terminal for KDE Plasma and other desktops," its README says. Hein wrote on the KDE blog that the feature set is deliberately modest for now. The name is pronounced "Kwee," XDA Developers reports.

The project has three parts. There is the Kwi application itself. There is a public QML module, so other apps built with Qt Quick and KDE's Kirigami toolkit can embed a terminal pane. And there is a KPart plugin for older apps built on QWidget. The application is built on the same QML module it offers to everyone else.

That embedding story matters inside KDE. Newer KDE apps need workarounds to embed Konsole, XDA reports, because Konsole is built on QWidget. A Qt Quick app can import Kwi directly.

Where the speed comes from

Konsole renders through QWidget on the CPU. Kwi renders with Qt Quick and the Qt Scene Graph, which run on the GPU through Vulkan or OpenGL, Phoronix reports. The GPU does the drawing, and the CPU is left to run your programs.

The other half is libghostty-vt. A terminal emulator has two jobs: make sense of the stream of text and control codes a program prints, and paint the result. libghostty-vt does the first job. It parses the output and tracks what is on screen, so Kwi's own code can focus on desktop integration, rendering and the interface. Hein says the library is ahead of other terminals on modern features, and that Neovim and Ghostel already use it.

Layer	Component	Job
Terminal engine	libghostty-vt 1.4.0 or later	Parses program output, keeps the terminal state
Rendering	Qt Quick and the Qt Scene Graph	Draws on the GPU through Vulkan or OpenGL
Pseudo-terminal	KPty, from KDE Frameworks	Connects the shell to the window
Interface	Kirigami	KDE's toolkit for Qt Quick apps

Hein's headline numbers come from his own test system. In the DOOM-fire-zig benchmark, which floods the terminal with fast-changing output, Kwi reached 870 frames per second against 23 for Konsole. Across benchmarks he puts the gain at 3x to 35x. No independent measurements have been published yet.

An experiment, not a direction

Hein is careful about what Kwi is not. "It is in no way a match for the 29 years of continuous development work on Konsole," he wrote. Readers should not "mistake Kwi as some kind of announcement of the future KDE direction." Phoronix describes it as experimental and not yet proposed as a Konsole replacement.

Testing so far has been limited. Kwi "has seen limited testing by a small circle of friends," the announcement says, and users should "expect obvious and immediate bugs." There is no tagged release at all, not even a v0.1.0. Hein also floats a longer-term idea: a Kwi-based alternative to Kmscon, the text console that runs before a desktop loads.

KDE itself shipped Plasma 6.8 in October with Konsole still in its usual place. Nothing about that changes with Kwi.

How to try it

The easiest route is the nightly Flatpak, built by KDE's own continuous integration and linked from the README. Building from source "can be difficult today," Hein says, because the dependencies are still reaching Linux distributions. The README lists them:

• CMake 3.28 or later
• Qt 6.10 or later
• KDE Frameworks 6.29 or later
• Kirigami Addons 1.11 or later
• Kirigami App Components 1.1 or later
• libghostty-vt 1.4.0 or later

One Flatpak caveat: the runtime can ship older components that affect Union theming, Hein notes, though an update says a merge request has fixed it. The libraries are licensed under LGPL 2.1 or 3.0, and the application under GPL 2.0 or 3.0. User and developer chat is in the #kwi:kde.org Matrix room.

What this means for developers

• Try it in a Flatpak, not as your daily shell. Hein's own words are "expect obvious and immediate bugs." Install the nightly beside Konsole, run your heaviest build logs through it, and see whether the speed shows up on your hardware.
• Benchmark your own workload. DOOM-fire-zig measures how fast a terminal can paint a flood of output. That is where GPU rendering shines. It says little about typing latency or scrollback with a million lines. Measure what you actually do.
• The QML module is the part to watch. If you build KDE or Qt Quick apps, Kwi gives you an embeddable, GPU-rendered terminal without the Konsole workarounds XDA describes. That is a new capability whether or not Kwi ever ships a 1.0.
• libghostty-vt is becoming shared infrastructure. Neovim, Ghostel and now a KDE project all lean on one parser. Fewer hand-written VT implementations means fewer parsing bugs, but it also means a bug in that one library lands everywhere at once.
• Do not plan around a Konsole replacement. Hein says this is not a KDE direction announcement. Keep Konsole in your scripts and documentation. Treat Kwi as a sign of where KDE terminals could go, not where they are.