The KDE project continues to develop applications and add features, this time introducing Kwi, a new terminal emulator.

Konsole has been the default KDE terminal emulator for years, but it may finally have some competition. In particular, the new emulator is designed to be a modern alternative, “built on a robust tech stack and following the latest KDE HIG and UI conventions.” Kwi uses elements of the popular Ghostty project, specifically libghostty-vt, along with KDE Frameworks like KPty. Notably, the modern underpinnings provide GPU acceleration, something Konsole lacks.

Eike Hein described Kwi’s status in a blog post :

Compared to the venerable and mature Konsole, Kwi is young and new. At the moment it offers a more streamlined feature set than Konsole, carefully realized using KDE’s latest HIG patterns. The way forward will be to build on this slowly and carefully, using everything we’ve learned as a community about running mature design processes over the last decade or so (hello, VDG!).…