I Built a 10 MB GPU-Accelerated Terminal in Rust + Metal
A few days ago, I released Metalterm , a new native terminal emulator for macOS built with Rust and Metal . https://metalterm.dev/ Yes, another terminal emulator. But I wanted to see how far I could push a terminal if I treated rendering performance, latency, memory usage, and smoothness as first-class features rather than implementation details. The result is a native macOS app that's currently…
A new native terminal emulator called Metalterm has been released for macOS. It is built using Rust, the macOS APIs, and the Metal rendering technology. The goal was to push terminal performance to its limits by treating rendering performance, latency, memory usage, and smoothness as first-class features. The result is a 10 MB application that consumes only about 2.6% of the available GPU frame budget at 120 Hz.
Metalterm offers several performance advantages compared to other GPU-accelerated terminals, such as low memory usage and fast startup. The terminal's architecture is designed to minimize unnecessary work before the GPU processes the frame. Metalterm's small size, memory efficiency, and customizable UI make it a promising tool for developers and terminal enthusiasts.
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