Eike Hein introduced Kwi on November 1, a new terminal for KDE Plasma and other free desktops that also supplies a terminal component for Qt Quick applications. The announcement presents an option for developers building with KDE's newer interface stack. Hein calls it an experiment and a proposal, not an announcement of KDE's future direction. There wasn't even a tagged 0.1.0 release at the time of his post.
Kwi combines libghostty-vt, the terminal library extracted from Ghostty, with KDE components including KPty and Kirigami. Its repository README lists both a standalone application and components for embedding a terminal in other software. That second use gives the project a purpose beyond offering another terminal window.
One component for the app and its hosts
According to Hein's architectural explanation, Konsole's embeddable KPart serves applications built with Qt's older QWidget interface toolkit. It doesn't offer an equivalent component for Qt Quick/Kirigami applications. Kwi supplies a public QML module for those applications, alongside a KPart plugin for QWidget hosts.
The README confirms that Kwi's application and KPart both use that QML module. Hein says Konsole's main application does not consume its own KPart, which contributes to differences between the standalone terminal and applications that embed it. Kwi's shared component is intended to avoid that split. For an application developer, this makes the component architecture a reason to investigate Kwi even if changing standalone terminals isn't a priority.
The division of work extends underneath the interface. libghostty-vt's documentation assigns it terminal parsing, state management and input encoding, including scrollback and reflow when a window changes size. Kwi handles the KDE integration around that library. Its interface uses Qt Quick, with rendering through the Qt Scene Graph, according to the announcement.
Trying it means accepting unfinished dependencies
The current build requirements include Qt 6.10 or newer, KDE Frameworks 6.29 or newer and libghostty-vt 1.4.0 or newer. The README links nightly Flatpak packages. Those are a route to trying development builds, rather than evidence of a stable release. Separately, the library documentation warns that its API is unstable and that breaking changes are expected.
Migration also needs work. Hein says Kwi already reads Konsole color schemes, but QWidget applications must change a line of code to request Kwi's KPart. His post identifies a central user preference for that choice as an unresolved problem. This report is based on the announcement and documentation. We haven't built Kwi, inspected its rendered interface or reproduced Hein's performance and accessibility claims.
The next useful milestones are a tagged Kwi release and a clearer way for existing applications to select its component. Hein's stated migration problem gives developers a concrete check: whether trying Kwi inside an application becomes a user choice or continues to require a code change.