v0.1.0 · early preview · Linux

vibeterm

A fast, native GPU terminal for Linux.

Download v0.1.0 View source

vibeterm with two tabs and three split panes: a file listing with icons and a git log, syntax-highlighted Rust code, and a powerline status bar above block-character graphs. — Tabs, nested splits, Nerd Font icons, truecolor and pixel-exact block graphics.

Why vibeterm

Starts in ~31 ms

Fonts load and your shell starts while the GPU initialises, so a window is ready before you notice.

Light and quiet

The lowest memory of the terminals we measured, 0% CPU when idle, and only changed rows are redrawn.

Tabs and splits

Drag dividers to resize, open new panes in your current folder, and zoom one pane's text without touching the others.

Plays well with tmux and nvim

Programs can copy to your clipboard, and powerline and block characters fill each cell exactly.

Performance

Measurement	vibeterm 0.1	Alacritty 0.17	Kitty 0.49	Konsole 26.08
Startup, until a command runs	31 ms	57 ms	134 ms	97 ms
Idle memory (RSS)	66 MiB	95 MiB	125 MiB	100 MiB
Coloured Unicode output	134 MiB/s	109 MiB/s	100 MiB/s	43 MiB/s
Plain text output	138 MiB/s	109 MiB/s	161 MiB/s	35 MiB/s
Full-screen redraws	167 MiB/s	131 MiB/s	204 MiB/s	46 MiB/s

Medians of repeated runs on one machine (Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Radeon RX 9070 XT, KDE Wayland), each terminal with default settings and a 110×32 grid. The best result in each row is bold. Throughput is how fast a terminal consumes output, not frame rate or input latency. Reproduce it with scripts/compare.py; method and caveats are in docs/performance.md.

Install

Arch Linux and CachyOS

git clone https://github.com/lfreixial/vibeterm
cd vibeterm/packaging
makepkg -si

Other distributions

Download vibeterm-0.1.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz from the release page, then:

sha256sum -c vibeterm-0.1.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz.sha256
tar -xzf vibeterm-0.1.0-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
./vibeterm-0.1.0-x86_64-linux/vibeterm

Needs glibc 2.39 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Fedora 40 or later), Wayland or X11, and a Vulkan driver. OpenGL is used when Vulkan is unavailable.

From source

cargo build --release --locked
./target/release/vibeterm

Status

vibeterm is an early preview. It's usable day to day, but it hasn't finished acceptance testing.

Not yet done: macOS and Windows, input-method composition (e.g. Chinese and Japanese), mixed-DPI monitors, the kitty keyboard and graphics protocols, and accessibility. See the changelog for details, and report issues on GitHub.