Introducing Kwi, a new KDE terminal emulator

A new KDE terminal emulator, Kwi, has been introduced to provide users with a modern and fast terminal experience. Built on the robust tech stack of KDE, Kwi follows the latest HIG and UI conventions. It is designed to be a simple and straightforward terminal, similar to what users expect from KDE software.

Kwi leverages the libghostty-vt library from the Ghostty project and familiar KDE Frameworks such as KPty. It boasts a speedy GPU-accelerated renderer powered by the Qt Scene Graph, using Vulkan or OpenGL for rendering. Its user interface is built with Kirigami, ensuring a seamless blend with other recent KDE applications and the Plasma desktop.

The icon for Kwi is a cute terminal ghost, reflecting the name "kwisin" or "gwisin," which means ghost in Korean. Compared to the mature Konsole, Kwi offers a more streamlined feature set, carefully realized using KDE's latest HIG patterns. The project aims to gradually build upon this foundation, learning from the community's experience with mature design processes over the past decade.

One of the main advantages of Kwi over Konsole is its performance. Kwi can be 3x-35x faster than Konsole, depending on the benchmark. This performance gain can significantly improve the user experience and reduce battery usage. Kwi also marries the libghostty-vt library to the KDE/Qt tech stack, allowing the project to focus on desktop integration and rendering performance.

Kwi offers several improvements over Konsole, such as a drop-in replacement solution for KDE apps written in Qt Quick/Kirigami and a public Qt Quick/QML module that can be imported by other KDE apps. This addresses the gap in developer offerings, as Konsole lacks a similar solution for Qt Quick/Kirigami apps.