Shitty - Fast terminal with native GPU rendering
Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
Shitty is a terminal emulator that prioritizes speed and low latency. It keeps terminal state on the CPU and uses native compute backends (Vulkan on Linux, Metal on macOS) for rendering, achieving faster throughput than Alacritty, kitty, and Ghostty in benchmarks. It supports a wide range of terminal features, including VT5xx controls, Unicode grapheme clusters, 24-bit color, and various keyboard and mouse protocols. Built in C++23, it offers easy installation via Homebrew, Nix, or manual build. Despite its playful name, it's a serious tool for developers seeking maximum terminal performance.
Blazingly fast. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours.
- mitchellh
Creator of Ghostty here. Always a fan of new terminals. I noticed your benchmarks are against Ghostty 1.3.1, which is fair, since its the latest released, but our IO throughputs in particularly the areas you tested have improved by more than double on some machines, so if you get a chance, I would ask you rebenchmark on `main`.
I don't know if it'd be faster than your terminal or not, but it'd be significantly faster than 1.3.1. On my M4 MacBook Pro, ASCII processing improved by about 2.8x, if that holds in your benchmarks, it would be faster than shitty. But, who knows. I'd prefer you ran it yourself.
- 3eb7988a1663
Gutenberg's copy of Moby Dick is 1.2MB[0]. Which is to say the slowest benchmarked terminal could display a paltry ~53 Moby Dicks per second, while shitty gives you ~98 Moby Dicks.
I am not sure how many Moby Dicks I require per second, but it is good to have options.
- yjftsjthsd-h
> The executable is named st; the desktop application and icon are named shitty
That conflicts with the already existing suckless st.
Also I am suitably impressed with the perf numbers, but I also somewhat take away that I could stick with (at least) alacritty or ghostty and not be much slower.
- jcelerier
> Shitty is moving from the imported GPL baseline to an MIT-only codebase. It does not intend to retain the GPL as the final project license.
that's really something that cannot be done if you don't have the original right of the code. It's 100% derived work and thus has to preserve GPL license, even if you rewrite every single line.
- p1necone
This is cool, but I gotta say - I care much more about keypress-to-screen latency on my terminals than throughput - would love to see some numbers on that.
- cyanregiment
Geeking out on terminals is like geeking out on shoelaces.
I'm glad you guys are out there - someone has to do it.
- joncp
Nice work!
I do wonder, however, whether people really have issues with perf on any terminal emulator in 2026
I’ve been living in Terminal.app / zsh / tmux / vim for 15 years and have never once thought “this is slower than I want.”
- mellosouls
Going by the childish naming of the project, it doesn't inspire confidence in the professionalism of the author going forward, and neither will it help with getting it installed on corporate networks.
I'm all for vulgar wit but this isn't that (yes I'm aware of the -tty convention) & just reinforces the cliche of tech skills inversely proportional to social ones