KDE's Kwi Terminal Claims 870 fps Against Konsole's 23, With No Tagged Release and No Stated Hardware

Eike Hein, a KDE developer, announced Kwi on November 1, a GPU-rendered terminal emulator for KDE Plasma that he says is 3 to 35 times faster than Konsole depending on the benchmark. The announcement on KDE Blogs names one test: DOOM-fire-zig, at 870 frames per second in Kwi against 23 in Konsole, "on a test system" it does not describe.

Kwi has no tagged 0.1 release. Hein wrote that testing has been limited, and that users should expect obvious bugs.

The 35x figure and what is missing from it

The 870 and 23 give a ratio of about 38, so the 35 times in the post is a rounded or separate run. The post lists no hardware, no graphics driver, no window size and no number for the other benchmarks that produce the 3 times end of the range.

The Linuxiac report by Bobby Borisov, its editor-in-chief, repeats the 3 to 35 range and notes the same gap: no benchmark names, hardware or method. It adds that the GPU approach is expected to cut battery use, again without figures.

1. Kwi870 fps
2. Konsole23 fps

Source: KDE Blogs, Introducing Kwi, November 1, 2026 (developer-supplied, unverified)

Treat the figures as developer-supplied. No independent party named in either article has rerun them.

What Kwi is built on

Kwi uses libghostty-vt, the headless parsing library split out of the Ghostty terminal, plus KDE Frameworks including KPty, Kirigami for the interface, and Qt Quick's scene graph drawing through Vulkan or OpenGL.

The Ghostty repository, which has 63.2k stars and an MIT licence, says libghostty-vt's behaviour is well proven in the Ghostty app but that "the API signatures are still in flux". Hein wrote that libghostty-vt plans an API-stable 1.0 within 4 to 6 months.

That dependency is the main risk for packagers. Hein warned that building Kwi is hard because its dependencies are new, and that Flatpak runtimes may ship older versions, which affects theming.

Konsole stays, for now

Hein wrote that Konsole has about 29 years of development behind it and millions of daily users, and that Kwi does not match it yet. He called Kwi "an experiment and a proposal". Linuxiac quotes the line that matters for distributions: "Importantly, Kwi is not an announcement that KDE intends to replace Konsole."

His stated product vision is that Kwi is "kind of unexciting": "Just what you want and expect out of a KDE Plasma terminal." Linuxiac lists the features it adds: Wayland fractional scaling, ligatures, Nerd Font and Powerline symbols, a fuller Kitty image protocol and Plasma colour schemes that change while the terminal runs. Kwi reads Konsole colour scheme files.

Applications that embed Konsole through its KPart need a one-line code change to use Kwi, and Hein called the long-term answer open. He also offers an embeddable Qt Quick module, which KDE's QML applications lack today. The same pattern of a smaller project reworking a mature one appears in our report on Enlightenment 0.28.0, 658 days after 0.27, and on Lightpanda 1.0 with its self-counted test scores.

What to watch

Neither the KDE post nor Linuxiac states a licence. The code is at invent.kde.org/utilities/kwi, with nightly Flatpak builds, and bugs go to bugs.kde.org under the "kwi" application. The 0.1 tag is the first point at which anyone outside the testing group can rerun the numbers.