Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
github.com
github.com
I am not sure how many Moby Dicks I require per second, but it is good to have options.
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.
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.
on the other hand what gives them the right to st but not you?
Distributions. They'll probably rename one or the other so that they can be installed in parallel.
The author of shitty encoded the whole terminal state machine in Ragel: https://github.com/pg83/shitty/blob/master/parser.rl
The thing generates one of big DFA with actions for everything that can ever happen in the terminal. Precisely correct way to do it. Plus, Ragel is a joy to program once you get the hang of it. You can compose edge-triggered, level-triggered, and recursive operators in surprisingly elegant ways.
https://www.vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser
Paul Williams made this years (if not decades) ago, and it has been widely used by terminal emulator implementers.
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.
The procedure described has been done many times, is well described, and is quite feasible, albeit quite complex.
I think I can handle it!
And, in any case, anyone who wants to can sue me in a real court, not an online one.
In my opinion, they're hypocrites. Hypocrites steal the term "free" from the community when they're not, and, in fact, they're hypocritical when they use the term "freedom."
The GNU/GPL is much closer to a commercial organization because they don't give me the code for free. They want all my changes in exchange for their code. How is that better than a commercial organization that just wants money?
For me, the open source movement is, first and foremost, charity, and I don't understand how anyone can demand anything in return for charity.
The fact that an evil corporation can take a piece of my code and close it doesn't bother me; it's charity for the good of society.
Furthermore, on Linux, I reuse buffers from the swapchain after the wayland compositor returns them, and I only update the areas that changed after I sent the buffer to the window system. In other words, I'm provably doing the minimum amount of work possible. Unfortunately, this isn't possible on MacOS, since the Metal documentation states that it can (and does) corrupt a buffer while displaying it.
Basically, based on code, not actual measurements, shitty is the best terminal in terms of change delivery latency.
That is a very bold claim to make for the amount of render code generated by the LLM. It's not obvious what the critical path even is, which is what would bound the latency. And I mean actual code, not just some informal description of what happens.
I vouched for your comment, as I find it perfectly 'not agreeing' answer.
The burden of proof also falls on the person making the claim.
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.”
xfce4-terminal starts utterly instantly without single instance feature.
Kitty has the single instance feature and starts instantly with it.
However, there is one case when throughput matters: when an application has a lot of output. But then the problem isn't the speed that it displays the text, it's going by too fast to read anyway, the problem is that the application can be slowed down by blocking on writing to stdout when the buffer is full. And honestly, the best approach in that case is probably not to actually render all the text, but send most of the output straight to the scrollback buffer, and only render some of the frames.
Now graphical nicely powered REPL environments is another matter.
I ask this question often in the comments when a new "blazingly fast" terminal is announced and after years of doing so, have yet to read an actually practical answer that applies to modern systems.
My guess is that some people just enjoy the process of optimizing well-understiod low-stakes graphical stuff.
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
It's partly frustrating because the laziness of the naming presumably doesn't actually reflect the effort that has gone into the project.
Your appeals to authority do not apply when the author is clearly telling you not to use it for that. We're well past the point where this kind of software eventually ends up under corporate use policy or any policy at all.
- we have 5,000 tests covering all aspects of terminal behavior
- we have address sanitizer and ub sanitizer runs of these tests
- we also have regular fuzzing!
- we even monitor code coverage
This is definitely a top 0.1% GitHub project in terms of development approach.
> and neither will it help with getting it installed on corporate networks.
I'm fine with it.
Shitty is almost 100% generated by AI, tests and all. Is that really what you see as the epitome of development? Enough that you self rank in top 0.3%?
This might not be something the author cares about. Compliance with corporate policies is certainly not something I've prioritized when giving away open source software for free.
With this you can DuckDuckKagi for the crappy terminal (versus “CRM crm”… ah guess they wanted you to remember their company name)
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.
I can't use half of the terminal emulators because theyre so slow that after hitting my key bind to open them and I start typing half of the first word is missing.
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...
And this gem: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
Honestly I do not understand those last ten years craziness about 'new-native-gpu-turbo-ultra-xhigh-max-terminal' <insert current trend here>.
(my) battle tested urxvt under X11 is STILL faster then shitty (and all others):
## ascii (95 MiB cat, best wall of 3)
| terminal | wall | user | sys | throughput | |---|---|---|---|---| | urxvt | 0.78s | -s | -s | ~122 MiB/s |
1. Don't call your project "shitty". At best it's juvenile humor. At worst, it's going to make adoption within companies difficult for literally no reason; and
2. You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special. Your tool should instead denote its purpose with its name. In this case something like "sterm" or "stty" would do that perfectly without being verbose.
I thought it was quite clever, and was surprised I hadn't thought of it (given the prevalence of "tty" puns like kitty and ghostty).
But I'm a 14 year old boy living in a 45 year old body, so I can't get enough juvenile humor. A friend of mine with similar taste in humor once said, "if I ever stop finding this stuff funny, put me in the ground", and I still wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.
(For example: whenever I need a quick scratch file to put some text in, I call it "shits", because then I can type "cat shits" and giggle inside my head. I'm also have cats, so I deal with cat shits daily.)
> You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special.
This I agree with, though perhaps in a politer way.
Regardless, though... live and let live? The existence of this doesn't harm you an any way, and your judgey moralizing is a bit much.
I wouldn't want to work somewhere like that. Trying to pretend that people don't swear is just dumb. It's not even offensive.
An interesting, and disappointing choice. Shitty, one may say.
Forcing someone to release their code for free isn’t freedom, that’s a lack of freedom. Oh, you want the code to be free. Well guess what? MIT licensed means you can have it. Oh, you want a third party’s changes to be made free. No. Expecting that is batshit insane.
If someone forks this, changes it, and doesn’t release their changes, this still exists. Nothing is lost.
When something is released under MIT, it is “released”. When GPL software is released, it “binds” anyone that works on it, adding requirements to the entity doing the work. I.e. not free.
There is a trait in human nature that pushes us to share our knowledge. But we would like this sharing to be mutual.
When I publish a piece of software for free, I would like others to read it, comment it, give me suggestions on how to make it better, and the whole community can benefit from the process.
Unfortunately, someone might instead take it, start making profit out of it, and never giving anything back to me or the community.
As a device to get the former effect and avoid the latter, a sort of "contract" was created that mimicks a copyright licence. It is called copyleft and says that you can do whatever you want with my work except profit.
Now, someone might say that stopping a third party from profiting out of something they have not made is correct, someone might say it nevertheless means removing a freedom from them.
Whose side are you on?
address this culturally, that is the only way to address this completely. legal means cannot fundamentally redirect the culture of a society and make them believe that sharing is better for everyone. if you want a society that shares what it creates, then help create THAT. forcing people to do it pushes them in the opposite direction, they want to grasp their things even tighter than before.
Now, please reread your post replacing "people" with "corporations" and check if it still sounds reasonable.
No one is forcing you to do anything, and least of all which software licenses to depend on. If you don’t like something, choose something else. Freedom, you know?
>you can do whatever you want with my work except profit.
GPL doesn't prohibit that.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
> If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.
Practically, to make a substantial profit, what you sell must be more worthy than something you can also download for free. So you must sell an enhanced version of the original software. And that is what the GPL wants you to give back and not keep for yourself.
I don't get it when the software author choses the license they don't see suitable in full, only because it's one of a common FOSS licenses, and than wiggle around it. There's nothing wrong with making open-source with exception, or dual licenses, or non-free software.
But thanks anyway, I'll keep an eye out on this project in case there's some reason to switch to it in the future. :)
Like a neighborhood kid outside on his bike yelling “shit” then pedaling away as fast as he can, to dissociate himself from the event out of fear of getting caught.
FaTTY - Fast Terminal (executable named “ft”)
RaTTY - Rapid Terminal (“rt”)
LighTTY - Lightspeed Terminal (“lt”)
Dragster (“dt”)
McQueen (“mt”)
Names are hard, but it’s trivial to come up with a name better than “shitty”.
if you are over 30, you are out of reach to anyone and everyone.
I just browsed the project for two minutes and it's one of the first things I noticed. std::thread is more portable (Windows, if anyone cares) and allows you to pass in a lambda, which keeps the code local and also has the compiler generate the closure for you instead of having to pass function pointers and void* captures around. I don't see any advantage to using pthread directly.
Of course I looked at the LLM output, but people, uh, make mistakes and can miss something.
> std::thread is more portable (Windows, if anyone cares) and allows you to pass in a lambda, which keeps the code local and also has the compiler generate the closure for you instead of having to pass function pointers and void* captures around. I don't see any advantage to using pthread directly.
These are obvious things, and the objections to them are equally obvious. For example, std::thread is an additional level of abstraction over pthreads, which, in essence (not in form), gives me nothing. And I don't care about Windows, really.
(I have, also, thought about building my own perf-optimized terminal. It's a fun problem space!)
My main complaint with ghostty is the crappy configuration.
I would need to display roughly 70 GB of benchmark-equivalent ASCII output before Shitty recovers a five-minute switching cost relative to GNOME Terminal.
This assumes I’m actively blocked by every byte being rendered.
Regardless, sometimes you just gotta write some code because there's an itch that needs to be scratched. Sounds like this author really wanted to see if he could write a super fast terminal, and make one faster than the incumbents. It's a cool achievement!
wild
this is not true on my machine, at least for my usual benchmark Doom-fire-zig[1]. on said benchmark, ghostty 1.3.1 runs at about 350fps, wezterm 20260713-212414-b3255666 runs at 415fps, Terminal.app runs at 100fps, iterm2 3.6.11 runs at 80fps.
I'm glad you guys are out there - someone has to do it.
They also count my steps.
(also I had to look up aglet)
Fuck nvm btw.
It matters!
There is some number of fps where "the human eye can't tell the difference" I bet there is one for ms delays
When we learn something well we model it thoroughly and notice the tiniest change
Good for you Ian, happy guy.
I gotta say though: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm
Most of these look like dogshit.
Feel like I would be tripping over my own feet lookin like a shipwreck.
This one is bullshit, he's padding content: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/startknot.htm That's not a knot. Not a knot.
That's the beginning of tying your shoes.
Come on Professor!