Introducing Kwi, a new KDE terminal emulator

Kwi is a new KDE terminal emulator intended as a modern, fast option for Plasma and other free desktops. It combines libghostty-vt, which handles terminal parsing and state, with KDE Frameworks and a Kirigami interface. Its Qt Quick renderer uses Vulkan or OpenGL GPU acceleration, unlike Konsole’s CPU-rendered QWidget approach. In some benchmarks, Kwi is reported to run 3-35 times faster, with potential benefits for responsiveness and battery use. It also aims to improve text and image rendering, fractional scaling, accessibility, and support for newer terminal protocols, including Kitty images and keyboard features.

Kwi is designed not only as a standalone app but also as an embeddable Qt Quick/QML component, giving newer KDE applications a terminal they can integrate. Because the main app uses that same component, settings and behavior should be consistent between Kwi and host applications. The project is also intended to make modern terminal features easier to develop by relying on a shared library rather than extending Konsole’s older, complex codebase. Kwi is still an early experiment, with no tagged 0.1 release and limited testing; it is not presented as a replacement for Konsole or a change in KDE’s direction. It supports Konsole color schemes, and nightly Flatpak builds are available, though dependencies and bugs may make trying it difficult.