GPU-accelerated terminal emulators ranked

kitty’s stated goals are “user perceived latency while typing” and smooth scrolling, and its documentation shows its work. The throughput table was measured “with the same font, font size and window size for all terminals”, on one named Linux machine, and the page sums it up bluntly: “kitty is twice as fast as the next best.” It adds that Typometer measurements on Linux give kitty “far and away the best latency of the terminals tested”. Keep in mind who ran the tests: kitty did, and you can repeat them with its kitten __benchmark__ command.

Day to day, ctrl+shift+t opens a tab, and the windows inside a tab can be arranged in layouts, like a tiling window manager. Images render inline through the Kitty Graphics Protocol, which Ghostty also supports. Fast numbers, and the receipts to match.

WezTerm is the terminal that follows you around. It runs on “Linux, macOS, Windows 10, FreeBSD and NetBSD”, the widest list here, and it can “multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows on local and remote hosts”, which its documentation compares to tmux or screen. Connect to a remote session and its tabs attach to WezTerm’s own window, with native mouse, clipboard and scrollback. The remote machine needs a compatible WezTerm installed for that.

Speed is the blank spot. WezTerm calls itself GPU-accelerated, but the pages we captured publish no benchmark results. On money, the README is plain: it is “a spare time project”, and sponsorship helps “cover the fees required to maintain the project”. Its latest release on GitHub, 20240203-110809-5046fc22, was published on 3 February 2024; kitty’s and Alacritty’s latest releases are both from 2026. The everywhere terminal, on a slow release clock.

Ghostty wants to feel like it was built for your desktop. Tabs and splits use “native UI components”, and on macOS the Quick Terminal “animates down below the menu bar” when you call it. Under the hood, each terminal gets “a dedicated read thread, write thread, and render thread”, and the parser uses SIMD instructions (which process several pieces of data in one CPU step).

Its speed claim is a comparison rather than a table: Ghostty and Alacritty are “usually within a few percentage points of each other”, and both are “something like 100x faster than Terminal.app and iTerm”. It is a passion project; its creator writes that it is something he works on “in my free time”. Polished, but macOS and Linux only for now.

Alacritty does one thing and leaves the rest to other tools. The README says you “won’t find things like tabs or splits”, which it leaves to “a window manager or terminal multiplexer”. What you get is speed and keyboard control: press Ctrl Shift Space to drop into vi mode, then move through the scrollback, search, and select and copy text using only the keyboard.

It measures throughput with vtebench and says it “manages to consistently score better than the competition”, though the README shows no figures. One detail from kitty’s own benchmark page is worth knowing: running Alacritty inside tmux roughly halved its throughput in that test. Lean by choice, and still marked beta.