August 2, 2026
Terminally online, terminally shady
Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
A hilariously named app claims it’s the fastest terminal, and the comments instantly got messy
TLDR: Shitty is a new text-window app for programmers that claims big speed wins over popular rivals. The real fireworks came from the comments, where people fought over the name, questioned whether the speed gap matters, and joked that terminal fandom is basically shoelace discourse.
A new app called Shitty has stomped onto Hacker News with the kind of confidence usually reserved for reality TV villains: it says it’s faster than your terminal and proudly calls itself memory-unsafe. Translation for non-terminal people: this is a text-window app for coders, and its creator is bragging that it opens fast, runs fast, and beats famous rivals in speed tests. That alone was enough to summon the internet’s favorite hobby: arguing.
And wow, the comments did not disappoint. One camp was genuinely impressed by the benchmark numbers, especially with the app beating big names like Alacritty, Kitty, and Ghostty in the posted tests. But even the praise came with side-eye. One commenter basically shrugged that if the difference is small, most people will just stick with what they already use. Another immediately spotted drama in the naming, pointing out that the actual executable is called st, which clashes with an already existing terminal by the same name. Classic nerd turf war.
Then came the jokes. The app’s name was roasted, celebrated, and weirdly admired all at once. One commenter declared it “unironically better” than bland software branding, while another reduced the entire debate to a perfect drive-by insult: geeking out over terminals is like geeking out over shoelaces. And that really is the vibe here: half the crowd is impressed, half thinks this is peak niche nonsense, and everyone agrees the name is doing outrageous amounts of work.
Key Points
- •Shitty is a terminal emulator designed for low latency, fast startup, and predictable resource use, using CPU-side terminal state and GPU-backed rendering with Vulkan on Linux and Metal on macOS.
- •The article reports benchmark results on an Apple-silicon MacBook showing Shitty outperforming alacritty, kitty, and ghostty in the provided 100MB GUI throughput tests for printable ASCII, and leading alacritty and ghostty in the random-bytes test.
- •The terminal supports a wide range of terminal capabilities, including VT52 through VT5xx controls, xterm extensions, Unicode grapheme handling, multiple keyboard and mouse protocols, color modes, selection and clipboard features, and OSC 8 hyperlinks.
- •Shitty is written in C++23, built with Clang, and depends on platform-specific libraries and toolchains such as Wayland and Vulkan on Linux and SPIRV-Cross, CoreText, Cocoa, Metal, and IOSurface on macOS.
- •The article includes concrete build and run instructions, command examples, terminal sizing and scrollback options, and font configuration examples for deploying and using the software.