Shitty Terminal Released: A New Memory-Unsafe Terminal Emulator Focused on Speed

Introduction to Shitty Terminal

Shitty is a newly introduced terminal emulator designed with a primary focus on performance. Its architecture prioritizes low latency, rapid startup times, and consistent resource utilization. The project explicitly states it is memory-unsafe, positioning itself as a high-speed alternative to existing terminal emulators.

Technical Architecture and Performance

The terminal maintains its state on the CPU and renders cells using native compute backends: Vulkan for Linux systems and Metal for macOS. Performance comparisons, such as cating 100MB of data, indicate that Shitty can outperform other terminals like Kitty in certain scenarios, particularly with random byte payloads that challenge parser efficiency. The comparison methodology involves equalizing terminal settings before measurement.

Feature Set and Compatibility

Shitty supports a comprehensive range of terminal features, including VT52 through VT5xx controls, widely used xterm extensions, and various screen management capabilities like primary and alternate screens, scrollback, and reflow on width changes. It handles Unicode grapheme clusters, combining characters, emoji sequences, and double-width characters. Color support extends from 16-colour to 24-bit, including extended underline styles. Keyboard and mouse protocols, shell integration, and lazy glyph rasterization are also included.

Development and Build Requirements

Shitty is written in C++23 and built with Clang. It uses UTF-8 internally and exports TERM=xterm-256color to child processes. Building the project requires Python 3, Ragel 6, glslangValidator, librsvg, pkg-config, utf8proc 2.9+, and POSIX threads and PTY support. On macOS, users need to install LLVM from Homebrew as the bundled Apple Clang does not support the required C++26 standard.