Ranking The Most Popular Terminals

Overview

A YouTuber stress-tests and ranks popular GPU/fast terminals—Electrity, Terminator, Ghosty, Kitty, Westerm—and also mentions Warp (with brief references to Tmux / “Omari” / DHH in passing). The evaluation emphasizes:

• Startup performance
• Resource usage (CPU/memory)
• Rendering and scrolling responsiveness
• Feature tradeoffs (tabs/splits, GPU acceleration, and configuration style)

Terminals compared

• Electrity
• Terminator
• Ghosty
• Kitty
• Westerm (notably problematic on Wayland)
• Warp (disqualified for a forced account requirement)

Mentioned: Tmux (as a workaround for tabs/splits in terminals that lack those features).

Startup time test

The test uses a GNOME Terminal tool plus “Hyperfind” to launch multiple instances.

Measured average/min/max startup times

• Ghosty: ~320 ms avg (min ~308, max ~336)
• Electrity: ~197 ms avg (min ~170, max ~248)
• Terminator: ~256 ms avg (described as in-between)
• Westerm: ~56–74 ms (fastest in the results; extreme values mentioned)
• Warp: disqualified because it requires creating an account, which the speaker strongly dislikes

CPU vs memory usage

CPU usage

• Deemed not worth benchmarking (all ~<0.1%).

Memory usage (RAM)

• Electrity: ~230 MB
• Ghosty: ~340 MB (unexpectedly higher than Electrity)
• Kitty: ~250 MB (roughly comparable to Electrity)
• Terminator: ~89 MB (lowest)
• Westerm: ~80–90 MB (after forcing X11 mode instead of Wayland)

Rendering speed / “scrolling feels sluggish?” tests

A large text file (~20MB, ~1 million lines) was used. The speaker benchmarked/cat output time to gauge responsiveness.

Rendering/response (average times)

Most terminals landed around ~2.5 ms:

• Electrity: ~2.5 ms avg
• Ghosty: ~2.5 ms avg (similar to Electrity)
• Kitty: ~2.5 ms avg
• Warp: not tested properly
• Terminator: only noticeably slower here, averaging around ~4 ms
• Westerm: “not working properly” for parts of the test; still referenced but with issues

Scrolling feel

• The speaker reports no noticeable sluggishness across terminals (assuming decent hardware).

True color / transparency checks

• Color and transparency differences were hard to perceive (everything looked “gray” to the speaker).
• Conclusion: differences appear to come more from features than from color accuracy.

Feature/UX & configuration takeaways

Electrity

• No tabs or splits (workaround: Tmux)
• GPU accelerated (major pro)
• Configuration via YAML

Kitty

• GPU acceleration and tabs
• Tabs demonstrated via Ctrl+Shift+T
• Configuration described as “config files” (speaker considers this the way it’s configured)

Ghosty

• GPU acceleration and a nice UI
• Uses Lua for configuration (noted as relevant if you prefer Vim/Neovim-like workflows)
• Tabs at the top
• Includes copy text popups (speaker specifically likes this UX)

Terminator

• Has tabs
• No GPU acceleration (considered a downside)

Westerm

• Breaks/throws errors on Wayland; forced into X11 mode
• Still performs well on speed/RAM in the tests

Ranking / tier conclusions

• Warp: fails early due to mandatory account creation → not rated as a winner
• Westerm: C tier (fast, but Wayland incompatibility is a dealbreaker)
• Terminator: B tier (tabs, but no GPU acceleration; also slower rendering in one test)
• Electrity / Ghosty / Kitty: treated as top tier (S tier) for performance and overall feel

Final pick among the S-tier

• Electrity, largely because it matches the speaker’s preferences and performed best overall—especially with GPU acceleration.

Main speakers / sources

• Main speaker: the YouTuber narrator (unnamed in the subtitles)
• Referenced entities: terminal projects including Electrity, Terminator, Ghosty, Kitty, Westerm, Warp, plus Tmux, GNOME Terminal, and Hyperfind (the launcher/benchmarking tool)