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.
> 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.
Mitchell is a big proponent of using AI to code. He’s just not a dummy and knows his sh*t and he reviews the code diligently. Hell, he just promoted that he started a company for making tooling for AI agents. There is lots of LLM code in Ghostty it’s just not attributed.
I'm not imposing my opinion, but in my experience, iterm2 is the slowest terminal emulator I know of, so I didn't even bother trying. But overall, I'll add iterm2 to the list, too.
No, there are no such plans right now, but overall, the project's architecture allows for easy separation of different layers for developing a terminal emulator - the parser, in the form of a ragel state machine, and the vterm state machine, with distinct boundaries between them. The rendering layer is separated slightly less clearly, but it's also solvable.
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.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701
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.”
Geeking out on terminals is like geeking out on shoelaces.
I'm glad you guys are out there - someone has to do it.
Optimize the aglets!
> 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.
I know, but there aren't that many two-letter abbreviations!
on one hand I wanna say you shouldn't make conflicting names
on the other hand what gives them the right to st but not you?
Let the best tool win.
Best named project I've seen this year!
I hoped that at least someone would like it :))
I will def try this out and I absolutely love the name. Just an A++ name
I prefer Ghostty as there is no this "Claude" thing in its contributors. But I guess it's always good to have competitions.
Mitchell is a big proponent of using AI to code. He’s just not a dummy and knows his sh*t and he reviews the code diligently. Hell, he just promoted that he started a company for making tooling for AI agents. There is lots of LLM code in Ghostty it’s just not attributed.
This is obligatory read: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...
Later, Microsoft fixes the issue but fails to give Muratori credit. After backlash, they went back and gave him a footnote: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-... (atlas release section)
GitHub thread in question: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
why no iTerm2 in the benchmarks ? It far outperforms the likes of kitty and ghostty
I'm not imposing my opinion, but in my experience, iterm2 is the slowest terminal emulator I know of, so I didn't even bother trying. But overall, I'll add iterm2 to the list, too.
Any plans for a "libghostty" alternative for your terminal?
No, there are no such plans right now, but overall, the project's architecture allows for easy separation of different layers for developing a terminal emulator - the parser, in the form of a ragel state machine, and the vterm state machine, with distinct boundaries between them. The rendering layer is separated slightly less clearly, but it's also solvable.
Unironically better name than “CRM“ for a CRM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142360
With this you can DuckDuckKagi for the crappy terminal (versus “CRM crm”… ah guess they wanted you to remember their company name)
Except others are already using it, with proper capitalization.
https://github.com/fearlessgeekmedia/shiTTY
This one just tried to reserve the name with an empty repo a year ago... probably where the LLM got the name.
https://github.com/immz4/shitty
Why wouldn't you use this?
Personally, I have never felt constrained by the performance of my terminal, so I pick based on other features.
(I have, also, thought about building my own perf-optimized terminal. It's a fun problem space!)
For example, flicker free resizes for MacOS, something that neither Kitty, nor Alacritti, nor Ghostty can boast of.
I'm not knocking your project, but ghostty doesn't flicker for me on resize. Is this a common problem people have?
My main complaint with ghostty is the crappy configuration.
It's not that it's a serious problem, it's just that for me, as a perfectionist, flicker is very noticeable when resizing.
I’m all in on wizzterm
You mean wezterm right?
Woosh