Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin
A modern GPU-accelerated terminal emulator like Ghostty can consume significantly more battery than apps such as Zoom or web browsers, despite only displaying text, due to inefficient GPU usage and failure to enter macOS power-saving modes. The article highlights the irony of using advanced hardware to perform a simple task and compares battery-heavy terminals with efficient alternatives. Solutions include switching to Terminal.app or configuring iTerm2 to disable GPU rendering when on battery. The author questions whether performance gains justify the energy cost in such tools.
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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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