Term uses far less memory v26.5.1+

What you may have noticed

Some of you told us Term got heavier the longer you used it — especially after resizing the text with a pinch, or after opening and closing a lot of terminals. You were right. Each of those left a little memory behind that Term never gave back, and it added up.

On a phone that matters. The system closes apps that use a lot of memory when they are in the background, so a Term that had grown large was more likely to be closed while you were in another app — and a closed app means your sessions reconnect when you come back.

What was wrong

Term draws your terminal with the font you picked. Every time the text size changed, and every time a terminal opened, Term loaded another copy of that font into memory — and the old copies were never released. A pinch gesture changes the size many times over, so a few pinches were enough to stack up dozens of copies.

Term now loads each font once and reuses it at every size. Switching to a different font lets the old one go.

Before and after

All numbers are from the same Huawei phone, with the same terminal font (Ubuntu Mono), before and after the fix.

Pinch-zooming the text

Memory used by fonts, with one terminal open:

Before, that 1.1 GB was still being held a minute later with the phone sitting idle. Now zooming in and out changes nothing: the fonts take the same 40 MB at every size.

Opening and closing a terminal

Total memory used by Term, back on the host list after each round of opening a terminal and closing its tab:

Before, every round after the first added about 55 MB, and none of it came back. Now the first terminal you open costs its memory once, and after that the number holds steady no matter how many times you open and close.

What you need to do

Nothing but update. The fix is in Term 26.5.1 and applies to every font — the built-in Iosevka Term, the fonts you download, and the system font. There is nothing to turn on.