Tool dossier

Zt

⚡️zt — A pure-Zig terminal emulator. 5.6ms startup‚ 73 MB/s throughput‚ 2 MB memory. Runs on X11‚ Wayland‚ macOS‚ and raw Linux framebuffer — no GPU required.

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Product snapshot

How the interface presents itself

Zt interface screenshot

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About

zt is a terminal emulator written from scratch in Zig. On an i5-12450H under X11, it starts in 5.6ms (87× faster than Ghostty), pushes 73 MB/s on dense ASCII (11× faster), and idles at 2.2 MB PSS (44× smaller). The entire binary, including a 59K-glyph embedded bitmap font with Nerd Fonts and CJK support, is 2.8 MB. It supports X11 (XCB+SHM), Wayland (pure Zig wire protocol, no libwayland), macOS (Cocoa/AppKit), and raw Linux framebuffer for headless or embedded use. Originally built to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 512 MB RAM, but the same constraints that make it fit there — SIMD-accelerated parsing, comptime backend selection, zero unnecessary allocations — make it fast everywhere.

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