Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin
A developer discovers their MacBook Air's battery is rapidly draining due to a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator like Ghostty, which consumes significantly more energy than apps like Zoom or browsers despite only displaying text. Modern terminals that use GPU rendering for smoother visuals fail to enter macOS power-saving modes, leading to excessive battery use. Switching to Terminal.app or configuring iTerm2 with a low-power profile can drastically reduce energy consumption. The article critiques the trade-off between perceived performance and actual efficiency in modern software design.
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Your Terminal is Burning Battery Like It's Mining BitcoinHow a 1970s-era application like a terminal emulator can consume more battery than Zoom with video. The irony, the causes, and the solutions.January 24, 2026 · Fernando | Translations:PtFrZhThe crime scene#Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café. A latte, views of the basilica, and yours truly with a shiny new MacBook Air M3 ready to work a couple hours with Claude Code before a meeting.Two hours later: battery at 15%. Red alert. Panic.But how? I was just in a terminal writing code. No video, no Zoom, nothing that would justify this kind of consumption.I open Activity Monitor, Energy tab, and there’s the culprit: Ghostty, with an accumulated consumption of 3,600 over the last 12 hours. For context, Brave Browser consumed 125.
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