Your Terminal Is Burning Battery Like It's Mining Bitcoin

Fernando was working at a café in Zaragoza with his MacBook Air M3, running Claude Code through Ghostty. Two hours later, his battery sat at 15%. The culprit? His terminal emulator. Ghostty, Alacritty, Kitty. They all use GPU acceleration for everything. But AI coding assistants like **Claude Code** don't stop. Spinners, streaming text, tool results, status updates. Constant output. Every character triggers the GPU pipeline. Metal fires up, shaders run, frames get composed. To display a spinning dot. These terminals also skip macOS App Nap because animated spinners keep the system convinced something important's happening.

The fix isn't pretty. Terminal.app, the default macOS terminal that looks unchanged since 2005, uses CPU rendering and enters App Nap properly. It's fine. Really. Want more features? iTerm2 lets you toggle off GPU rendering when you're on battery. Ghostty doesn't give you that choice. GPU or nothing. Great at a desk, painful at a café.

Using 2026 GPU power to emulate a 1978 VT100 is absurd. The original VT100 drew 30 watts including its CRT. Fernando's MacBook Air, built around energy-efficient Apple Silicon, burns more juice showing git status than running a video call or a **local LLM**. Sometimes the old tool is old for a reason.