zt
⚡zt — the fastest terminal emulator.
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midasdf

zt - ⚡zt — the fastest terminal emulator.

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⚡zt is a terminal emulator that starts in 5.6ms and pushes 73 MB/s throughput — faster than st, alacritty, kitty, and ghostty on the same hardware. It renders directly to the Linux framebuffer (no X11 needed), X11 via shared memory, Wayland via pure wire protocol, or macOS via Cocoa. No GPU, no runtime dependencies, no bloat. Built for a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 512MB RAM, but runs on any Linux or macOS system. Free, open source (MIT). Zero dependencies. Single static binary.

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midasdf
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Hey! I'm midasdf, the maker of zt. I built zt because I daily-drive a HackberryPi Zero — a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W in a handheld cyberdeck case with 512MB of RAM. Existing terminal emulators were either too heavy (ghostty pulls in GPU deps, kitty needs OpenGL) or too slow for this hardware. So I wrote one from scratch in Zig. It renders directly to the framebuffer — no compositor, no GPU, no Xlib. On my x86 machine it starts in 5.6ms (ghostty takes 492ms) and pushes 73 MB/s throughput. Some design decisions I'm proud of: - Row-map scrolling: scrolls move pointers, not cell data. 60K scrolls = 44MB moved vs 880MB the naive way. - Comptime backend: X11/Wayland/fbdev/macOS chosen at compile time, zero cost for unused paths. - The entire font (59K glyphs + Nerd Fonts) is embedded as a binary blob. No fontconfig, no freetype. zt is part of a larger stack I use daily — I also wrote an i3-compatible window manager (zephwm, 220KB) and a terminal multiplexer (zplit, 91KB). Together they use under 6MB of memory. Prebuilt binaries are on GitHub Releases. Would love feedback, bug reports, or just hearing if it works on your machine. Thanks for checking it out!