Shitty is a fast terminal emulator built for low latency and fast startup. It uses native compute backends: Vulkan on Linux and Metal on macOS. Benchmarked against Alacritty, Kitty, and Ghostty, Shitty shows superior throughput in both text and random byte tests.

Features include VT52 through VT5xx controls, xterm extensions, Unicode support, and multiple color modes. It supports synchronized output, reflow, and various selection protocols.

Built in C++23 with Clang, it requires Python 3, glslang Validator, librsvg, and other dependencies. Linux needs Vulkan and Wayland; macOS uses Metal. It includes a Base64 implementation and optional SIMD acceleration.

Shitty is a hard fork of Zutty by Tom Szilagyi, transitioning from GPL to MIT license. New contributions are dual-licensed. The original Zutty code remains under GPLv3-or-later.