Benchmarking 9 terminals on X11 and Wayland shows a 10x memory spread, with st lowest and ptyxis/kitty highest by USS/PSS.
Key Takeaways
st uses ~3KB USS idle, under one-tenth the memory of kitty (~56KB USS) or ptyxis (~55KB USS) on X11.
kitty’s memory ballooned to 50GB swap across 10 instances on a 16GB machine, causing system-wide sluggishness.
gnome-terminal outperforms konsole significantly despite both being desktop-environment defaults.
foot supports pixel-perfect timg image rendering and stays memory-lean, making it a strong Wayland-native option.
st has no scrollback buffer; author landed on lxterminal for X11 and foot for Wayland after that discovery.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters note raw memory numbers miss important terminal quality dimensions; two LWN articles on terminal emulator correctness were cited as context.
GNOME’s replacement of gnome-terminal with ptyxis drew criticism given ptyxis ranks last in the benchmark; one commenter attributed ptyxis’s bloat to Mesa shader and GTK font-cache overhead, noting encrypted scrollback pre-allocation keeps growth flat across tabs.
The practical timg tip resonated: macOS users found brew install timg works without kitty, enabling in-terminal image browsing without switching emulators.
Notable Comments
@ventana: timg works in standard macOS Terminal via brew install timg, no kitty required for quick image browsing.
@jmclnx: argues tmux/screen eliminates the need for many open terminals entirely, reframing the memory problem.
