Metalterm: Rust and Metal-Powered macOS Terminal Weighs Under 10 MB
Developer released Metalterm, a native macOS terminal emulator built with Rust and Apple's Metal GPU framework, designed to prioritize rendering performance, low memory use, and fast startup. The app weighs approximately 9.8 MB and consumes only 0.22 ms of GPU time per frame, using just 2.6% of the available frame budget on a 120 Hz display. Unlike many modern terminals built on Electron or web stacks, Metalterm uses native macOS APIs and a custom Metal renderer, giving the developer direct control over the entire rendering pipeline. Benchmarks run by the developer show Metalterm outperforming Ghostty and Rio in app size, cold start time, idle memory, and PTY throughput under the same test conditions. The project is publicly accessible at metalterm.dev, with the developer noting benchmark results may vary depending on hardware and environment.
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