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Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

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Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#41
post #37

Two mild criticisms: 1. Don't call your project "shitty". At best it's juvenile humor. At worst, it's going to make adoption within companies difficult for literally no reason; and 2. You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special. Your tool should instead denote its purpose with its name. In this case something like "sterm" or "stty" would do that perfectly without being verbose.

> At best it's juvenile humor.

I thought it was quite clever, and was surprised I hadn't thought of it (given the prevalence of "tty" puns like kitty and ghostty).

But I'm a 14 year old boy living in a 45 year old body, so I can't get enough juvenile humor. A friend of mine with similar taste in humor once said, "if I ever stop finding this stuff funny, put me in the ground", and I still wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.

(For example: whenever I need a quick scratch file to put some text in, I call it "shits", because then I can type "cat shits" and giggle inside my head. I'm also have cats, so I deal with cat shits daily.)

> You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special.

This I agree with, though perhaps in a politer way.

Regardless, though... live and let live? The existence of this doesn't harm you an any way, and your judgey moralizing is a bit much.

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#42
post #30

Nice work! I do wonder, however, whether people really have issues with perf on any terminal emulator in 2026 I’ve been living in Terminal.app / zsh / tmux / vim for 15 years and have never once thought “this is slower than I want.”

Terminal.app is amongst the best, if these old danluu benchmarks still hold https://danluu.com/term-latency/

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#44
post #30

Nice work! I do wonder, however, whether people really have issues with perf on any terminal emulator in 2026 I’ve been living in Terminal.app / zsh / tmux / vim for 15 years and have never once thought “this is slower than I want.”

To me, the most relevant aspect is the time it takes to open. I can't believe how slow the startup time in common linux distributions is by default, it's so annoying, by the time it opens I already forgot what I wanted to do. Alacritty has this cool feature where you only ever have to "open" a single terminal, whereas new windows can be created very efficiently with `alacritty msg create-window`, being forks of the i…

this is is not new. we have had factory model (forking the initial window) in terminal emulator since 1990s.

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#45

Gutenberg's copy of Moby Dick is 1.2MB[0]. Which is to say the slowest benchmarked terminal could display a paltry ~53 Moby Dicks per second, while shitty gives you ~98 Moby Dicks. I am not sure how many Moby Dicks I require per second, but it is good to have options. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

Besides, most screen only show 60 images per second. That's not many Moby Dicks per second.

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#46

Why wouldn't you use this?

Because I don't need to. I've never even once thought "my terminal feels slow and I want to find a different one". My terminal (xfce4-terminal) also uses a GUI toolkit that makes it visually fit in my desktop, and I like that.

Regardless, sometimes you just gotta write some code because there's an itch that needs to be scratched. Sounds like this author really wanted to see if he could write a super fast terminal, and make one faster than the incumbents. It's a cool achievement!

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#48
post #37

Two mild criticisms: 1. Don't call your project "shitty". At best it's juvenile humor. At worst, it's going to make adoption within companies difficult for literally no reason; and 2. You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special. Your tool should instead denote its purpose with its name. In this case something like "sterm" or "stty" would do that perfectly without being verbose.

shitty is a perfectly cromulent name.

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#49
post #37

Two mild criticisms: 1. Don't call your project "shitty". At best it's juvenile humor. At worst, it's going to make adoption within companies difficult for literally no reason; and 2. You don't need a two letter command. I'm sorry but you're not that special. Your tool should instead denote its purpose with its name. In this case something like "sterm" or "stty" would do that perfectly without being verbose.

> At worst, it's going to make adoption within companies difficult for literally no reason

I wouldn't want to work somewhere like that. Trying to pretend that people don't swear is just dumb. It's not even offensive.

Re: Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

#50

This is obligatory read: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t... Later, Microsoft fixes the issue but fails to give Muratori credit. After backlash, they went back and gave him a footnote: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-... (atlas release section) GitHub thread in question: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm... And this gem: https://github…

I will forever love reading or watching Casey dunking on people from so far above that they’re unaware of the delta.
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