Term reads terminal output up to 5× faster

What got faster

Every character a server sends — a line of a build log, a colour change, a Chinese word, a full-screen app redrawing itself — has to be read and placed on Term’s screen before it can be drawn. That step is what this release speeds up. Drawing the screen was already fast; this is the work that comes before it.

You notice it when a lot arrives at once:

• cat of a large log, or a build that prints thousands of lines
• full-screen apps that redraw constantly — htop, btop, vim while scrolling
• coding agents streaming long answers and diffs
• colourful output: ls --color, compiler errors, git log --graph

Over Wi-Fi or mobile data, the connection is usually slower than either number below. What changes there is how much of the phone’s time each screenful costs, so more of it is left for everything else.

Built for coding agents

The work Term is built around is the one people now do most in a terminal on a phone: running a coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, opencode and the rest — on a server, over SSH or mosh. Speed is part of that, but only part. An agent prints a few thousand characters a second, far below what any modern terminal can read. What decides whether a session feels right is everything around it:

• The screen is right. Chinese and emoji take exactly the width the agent expects, so diffs, tables and borders line up, and a redraw lands whole instead of tearing. See text and emoji.
• The keys arrive. Shift+Enter starts a new line in the agent’s prompt, and the key bar switches to the agent’s own keys.
• The session survives the phone. Over mosh it rides through Wi-Fi and 5G switches and comes back after the app is closed. See mosh auto-resume.
• You can drive it hands-light. Tap where a typo is to fix it (tap & double-tap), or say a prompt instead of typing it (voice input).

The speed-up in this release is headroom for those moments when an agent does dump a lot at once — a long diff, a test run, a build log — so the phone spends less of its time on it.

The numbers

Each row is 8 MB of one kind of output, fed through each terminal’s own engine on the same 80-column screen. Megabytes per second, higher is better.

Measured on a Mac with an Apple M1 Pro, each engine built for speed, best of five runs. A phone’s processor is slower than this one, so the numbers on a phone are lower.

Ghostty is still the fastest in three of the five rows, by the widest margin on plain text. Term is now the fastest of the three on full-screen app redraws, ahead of Ghostty on colour and level with Alacritty there, and ahead of Alacritty on the other four. Colour and redraws are what agent output is mostly made of.

Nothing else changes

The screen looks exactly as it did. Before shipping, we fed the old and the new Term the same output — thousands of runs of text, emoji, colour, wrapped lines and full-screen apps — and checked that both put every character in the same place, in the same colour, every time.

Available from Term 26.8.3. Nothing to switch on.