Ghostty 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

Ghostty 1.0

ghostty.org

2,319 pointsmatrixhelix681 comments

<3 This has been a work of passion for the past two years of my life (off and on). I hope anyone who uses this can feel the love and care I put into this, and subsequently the amazing private beta community (all ~5,000 strong!) that helped improve and polish this into a better release than I ever could alone.

Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that there is a good group of EXCELLENT terminals out there, and I'm not claiming Ghostty is strictly better than any of them. Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices.

Shout out to Kitty, WezTerm, Foot in particular. iTerm2 gets some hate for being relatively slow but nothing comes close to touching it in terms of feature count. Rio is a super cool newer terminal, too. The world of terminals is great.

I’ve posted a personal reflection here, which has a bit more history on why I started this, what’s next, and some of the takeaways from the past two years. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection

Just make sure not to get caught in the pitfall that is maximum render speed, which can lead to missing out on efficiency during slow and partial rendering.

Missing damage tracking, always painting everything (even when the window is a full 4k monitor), etc. kills performance and input latency when dealing with realistic redraw workloads like text editing, blinking cursors and progress bars. Much too often to terminals worry only about the performance of `cat /dev/urandom`...

Congrats on your 1.0 release! Building a term from scratch is no small task. And it looks like after 2 years you already have something I'm seriously considering switching to. That's seriously impressive. And though I'm mostly a Linux supremacist, I genuinely appreciate and respect your dedication to providing native applications on all major platforms. I see too many projects do one of two things: only support one platform at first, with some vague promise of doing others in the future left unfulfilled for years. Or going the easy route of using electron or some other cross-platform toolkit, getting cross-platform support at the cost of a significantly worse experience. There is no substitute for doing the extra work, at the end of the day, and you're already well on your way there at such an early point. Again, I'm impressed!

Now, the one thing I've coveted for years is a linux term with tmux control mode support, ever since I used iterm2 during my short tenure as a Mac user. I can see from your github issues that this is in the works(https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935), which is great. It looks like a lot of the necessary UI elements are already in place, as well as partial support for the control mode protocol. Do you have any idea how far off this is from being completed? I don't wanna make demands or anything, I know this is a passion project with lots of things still to work on. As far as I know(and I look around quite often) control mode support is still something no existing term for linux supports. Being the first could drive a lot of adoption! I'd also like to offer my help in pushing it over the goal line. I haven't touched Zig, but I'm a polyglot with plenty C experience and Im highly motivated to bring this feature to my Linux systems. Some guidance on things I might do to help would be welcome. The final 3 points of the checklist don't have much detail provided.

Again, no pressure, thanks for all your amazing work, and good luck with continued development!

For those interested, the link below from Mitchell's blog explains the different goals he's trying to reach, compared to other terminal emulators.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming

I love this page in your docs:

https://ghostty.org/docs/about

Clear, friendly, modest, respectful and with the right balance of detail vs overview.

Congratulations on your launch.

How you've managed to communicate effectively with so many people who were using the beta version to craft the final release is beyond me! I downloaded it last night, wrote one line of theme configuration (I picked the batman theme). and For me it just works fine and faster than any other terminal emulator I've ever worked with. Also great with 'less' and 'tmux'. I just switched to 'Ghostty'! so thank you.

Just downloaded it because of the animation on the site. How did you make that? it's cute.

The terminal is good. I don't have any issues with the stock mac os terminal app but I'll give yours a go for a bit. I can't tell exactly how, but it does feel faster - I'm not sure exactly how it is but it looks like it renders text faster.

I've been a beta tester from very early on. I came for the performance but stayed for the stability. I've only had a rare few crashes and all but one was a duplicate in the bug tracker.

I thought I needed search but as Mitchell put it, not a 1.0 feature. Ripgrep was always the answer.

Very happy to share the ghostty experience with the world!

Looks great. Switching from wezterm and kitty before that, and the native feel on macOS is indeed better than those emulated tabs. Also it is really quite zero config where to me it seems only one line of color theme is needed, together with setting TERM for ssh. (Default font happens to be mine.) Bundling so much color theme felt a bit waste of space, but it is nice that I don’t need to define them myself which also makes switching theme tedious. I also love to see it lands at 1.0 where features, documentation, and promotional materials seem polished already.

Chances are, it will become my default terminal in 2025!

The only nitpicking is the doc does not seem to have a search function. It would be great if I can search color or ssh and find the relevant page address that immediately, without navigating the tree or relying on external search engines.

I haven't heard of Ghostty before today. I'm reading the docs; but what are the main selling points?

Personally, I've used Terminal.app (for a bit), iTerm (for a long while), Konsole (in the past, on Linux) and more recently I standardized on Alacritty (macOS) and Kitty (Linux). GPU acceleration puts it in the same general bin as my current toolchain, but your comment alludes to it pulling in some concepts from iTerm, possibly -- is that the case?

Thanks so much for this. I really enjoy using it and I also refer to the source code quite a bit as I'm trying to get more familiar with Zig :)

How do you plan on sustaining the project? Do you have enough committers so you’ll not burn out? Will you need support? Is there a way to donate? I guess what I’m getting at is what is the long term sustainability work around this?

I think you've done an excellent job running the community for Ghostty and it is a prime example of how to do it right. From the Discord to Github repos you've been a class act all the way through and have pushed folks to be good, civil internet denizens. Much respect.

If anyone cares to search through Github, they will see loads and loads of Issues and PRs created by Mitchell in many of the related Open Source projects that Ghostty uses/references. From zig to kitty to supporting libraries, Mitchell has been trying to get the terminal community working together and have some sort of standards. A lot of them are like "X does this, Y does that, why are you doing it this way? Can we all do it this way?" and then having Ghostty follow the most reasonable solution (or supporting several!).

You've saved me an immeasurable amount of time and sanity over the last few years with the tools you've been building, and simply put: thank you.

I'm extremely excited to give Ghostty a whirl.

Just built this from source on Fedora and I have to say the experience even for building-from-source is flawless. Immediately replaced Kitty for me; it feels smoother and faster. Amazing work.

Alacritty on macOS and Linux user here (Windows Terminal on Windows due to easily different shells available, formerly used iTerm2 on macOS). I make up for lack of tabs with zellij locally (tmux remotely). Also allows me to relog or close/update Alacritty. I will give Ghostty a whirl but why no shout out to Alacritty? Which features am I missing out on?

I'm a fan of your work! I'm curious about how you decided to work on building a terminal for your next project among your other ideas. If you have time later, could you share your main motivation with us or link to an existing post if you already mentioned it elsewhere?

Thank you for making this. Does it support quake mode? It's hard to tell looking at the docs.

> Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices.

I was looking on the website to try and understand this more but couldn’t find any information. Perhaps I missed it?

Looks cool man.

Does it have a way to do tabs, and split terminal vertical and horizontal? Those are the only features keeping me on Terminator.

I've tried Tmux, but it isn't the same, so please commenters, avoid from the suggestion.

Shoutout to you sir for Shouting out the other terminals. It’d be easy for someone of your fame and talent and history to ride the hype to the GOAT of all terminals. But you stayed humble. Props.

Thank you for building this! I’ve loved using this over the last two months or so and really appreciate the work you’ve put into it.

I’ve been a very happy iTerm2 user and support the dev on GitHub Sponsors (and I’ll continue to do that), but I love your commitment to making a fast, native app (and cross platform, no less) and really appreciate this very obvious labor of love that has also been really interesting to watch from afar as the development has progressed!

Congrats Mitchell! It has been really cool to see Ghostty progress as a project, and I've enjoyed having it as my daily driver these past few years :)

I've been looking forward to it for a while, I'm really happy about this. Thanks for your work on this project.

super cool!

kitty has been my default for a few years now— highly superficial, but my designer side landed on kitty as it was one of the few that supports ligatures by default, specifically for the fira code font for my bias.

does ghostty support ligatures?

what was the motivation to start this project? it got so many points here, hence I assume there must be something really useful about it - but I so far fail to see it.

Congratulations.

On the cross-platform library, I wonder why "libGhostty" and not libTerminal. Which seems like a more appropriate in term of library?

Terminals are always welcome :) I hope you can add Win supoort so I can try it at work.

Congrats for the release and happy new year.

Thank you for making this! I've been waiting to use it for quite some time. Really happy to take it for a spin.

It's surprisingly convenient and works as I expect it to work all the time. Fantastic job!

Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done and for sharing your passion project with us.

how did you decided on building for arch and NixOS but not for red hat or debian?

thank you and the community for the work. i hope to see blocks (not sure if this is a shell thing or a terminal thing) the same way warp does it :)

Enjoyed hearing about this on The Changelog recently!

Looks really awesome. I'm going to sound like I don't belong in the hipster terminal club, but the reason I shied away from some of the other terminals is the lack of tabs, which looks like yours has when I did a quick Google question/search. (if wezterm and the like have them, I must have missed it or it wasn't obviously apparent in the settings how to achieve them).

I know everyone will say but tmux and/or native multiplexing bla, but I'm kind of old school and only do screen remotely if needed, and I just like a lot of terminal tabs in my workflow with a quick mod left/right arrow to navigate between (and if native multiplexing in Ghostty is simple and easy I'd probably do some of that too). Perhaps this is why I've never left iterm2.

No mention of Cool Retro Term!?!? Typical elitist behavior... /s

I'm just having a bit of fun, but it is a fun terminal every once in a while. https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

this guy is a billionaire guys...

After a quick test this looks incredibly good and fast. I'll use it as a terminal for the next weeks to see how it goes, but I have good feelings. Thank you so much for writing it.

EDIT: WOOOW, for me this is going to be a game changer. I was just working at Redis stuff outputting a ton of debugging info and results, and normally the terminal was the bottleneck, and here instead it printed half million of results in the blink of an eye. And then I could go back in the history without any performance degradation. I love this: for development of systems it makes a big difference.

Really need scrollback search though. Was a bit surprised it was launched without that.

why don't you just pipe it into a file and then less it? if your redis stuff prints so much stuff you might want to reevaluate the respective program logic.

I've been using Ghostty for several months now (used Alacritty before that). Ghostty is really, really good. It's fast, it gets the text rendering right (many cross-platform terminals struggle with this), and it has all the features I need.

It's also some very well-written Zig code. We use some of the code for graphemes in Bun for `Bun.stringWidth`.

Likewise coming from alacritty myself. This out of the box gives me everything I really want and does it well. Not to mention the development process was quite refreshing to see. Decision making process for sane defaults and to allow customization quite easily.

Nicely done.

Ghostty has a hard-to-find "quake mode" that may interest some.

During the beta I had it configured like this on macOS:

    keybind = global:cmd+space=toggle_quick_terminal
    quick-terminal-animation-duration = 0.1

There isn't an option to set the default height of the "quick terminal" window that I'm aware of but you can drag the bottom of the window after it opens and it will persist between toggles.

Unfortunately no tab support yet in the quick terminal, and it does not work on top of fullscreen applications. Would be great if these things would work at some point.

Currently I am using Wezterm and iTerm2 for the quake style terminal, but using two different terminals is quite annoying. I really miss Visor and TotalTerminal.

Hmm any way for this to work in kde plasma wayland?

In yakuake they have to register the Open/Retract shortcut with KGlobalAccel [1] and I don't think global shortcuts are implemented otherwise

[1] https://github.com/KDE/yakuake/blob/164d24b8bad1175199260c62...

I'm using ctrl+` :

    keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal

It was the first thing I made sure ghostty supported it before trying it.

Setting the initial height of the quick terminal is under development: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2384

Lack of tab support in the quick terminal is a bummer, but it should come eventually: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2329#issuecomm...

For now, splits are the way to go in the quick terminal.

This is the first thing I went looking for when looking at the docs, thank you.

Downside is that the quick terminal doesn't support tabs. Unfortunately that's currently a dealbreaker for me.

Thank you! First thing I was looking for too. Cannot imagine trying a terminal without this.

Doesn't seem to like that keybind now, and searching the docs doesn't give me answer. Do you know if something still works?

Also, why cmd+space? That's the MacOS spotlight search binding.

Love me some quake style terminals, will check this out

Amazing, thanks! This is most of how I use a terminal. Will give it a go.

Does this work under Wayland? I remember that being an issue for Guake.

Where does one add this? Is there a config file?

Super handy!

Related. Others?

Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments)

Ghostty Devlog 004 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709113 - Sept 2023 (2 comments)

Talk: Ghostty and Some Useful Zig Patterns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491031 - Sept 2023 (2 comments)

Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty Devlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736686 - July 2023 (1 comment)

I have found the following community site for generating Ghostty config quite helpful https://ghostty.zerebos.com/

Hey this is my tool, thanks for sharing! I've been very happy with how well received it has been so far!

Oh wow, this great! Is it your project? Either your post deserves more upvoted, or this link deserves it's own post. Thanks for this one! <3

This is great, thanks! It would be amazing if CMD + , would open this directly.

I initially scoffed when I read "platform-native UI" as I've found programs made in Electron typically proclaim something similar when they are anything but native, so when I saw it used GTK for Linux (SwiftUI for MacOS) my interests were piqued. Always fun to mess around with new terminal emulators.

edit: alas, it doesn't support bitmap fonts..

You can get pixel perfect bitmap fonts by using their TrueType conversions and using fractional point font sizes. There are dozens of bitmap enthusiasts that were in the beta and they're totally convinced because well... it's pixel identical.

I've noted before in issues I'm open to supporting bitmap fonts if someone contributes it, but not interested in adding it myself. The workaround above is very good.

Looks like a very nice project overall. I was initially interested in the "native" UI but after trying Ghostty I think I've realised that in a terminal app I actually want all the UI to be terminal/TUI based within the terminal itself. This is a personal preference I've discovered rather than a criticism of Ghostty.

It seems fast and really nice otherwise, so I'll keep fiddling with it, but so far I still prefer, for example, the "non-fancy" tabs in WezTerm (where the tabs are just rendered as line of terminal cells at the top or bottom of the window rather than GUI elements), and the way that modals ("Really quit WezTerm?" etc.) are also rendered within the terminal.

I'd also struggle to live without quick select mode[0].

[0] https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html

Thanks for this post, first thing I did was search "bitmap" in the thread. If I can't use Terminus (+Unifont fallback), it's not for me.

>it doesn't support bitmap fonts

Very disappointing. Not sure why people are trying to kill off bitmap support in everything these days. Will stick with foot.

Many people here seem impressed about speed/performance. I have been using all sorts of terminals / emulators over the past 20 years and it never occurred to me a terminal can be slow. When I type a command, I just get the result instantaneously, for any terminal. What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow?

I don‘t get it either. The only use case I can see is for programs that output basically a video feed in text form.

A commenter in this thread mentioned sifting through log / debug output… but why wouldn‘t you pipe it to a file instead?

TESTED:

1. Create a file with 1 million lines:

  for i in {1..1000000}; do echo "Line $i: This is a test of terminal performance."; done > bigfile.txt

2. cat the file and see how much time it takes:

  time cat bigfile.txt

RESULTS:

- iterm2: 3.5s

- Default macOS terminal: 2.3s

- Ghostty: 1.8s

> What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow?

Rendering huge stdout/stderr can be a bottleneck. Try running a program that writes half a million lines of text to stdout without file redirects and a lot of terminal emulators will struggle to keep up.

I think this mostly plays a role when using modal text editors like vim in your terminal. Speed matters so very much then! Give it a try if you want ;)

This feels like the Vagrant moment [1] again. Cant believe 15 years have passed already.

Together with Bun I believe that is two high profile open source software made with Zig.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

Wayland WM "River" is great too.

What do you mean the "vagrant moment"?

and it’s the same guy

I couldn't find any screenshots, also, why is this being hyped so much? What have I missed?

I'm wondering about this too. I looked at it and don't see any reasons to switch away from kitty, which is just as fast, has more features, and has never given me trouble. Kovid is a fantastic developer who's very responsive and fixes bugs in sometimes literal minutes after they were reported.

I guess the hype is from the series of blogposts about the lengths they've gone to make it fast. Also it looks like mac doesn't get a lot of native terminals so this has them excited.

Just try it. I tried and the launch was so smooth that I'm keeping it a few days to test it. My current biggest problem is that I launch my terminal using the spotlight shortcut (⌘-space on mac) and while iterm2 is found when I search for term, ghostty isn't.

This is a neat blog post explaining part of the magic:

https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/

I use Foot as my terminal and Niri as my WM. It’s a great combo. Niri handles splits for me, and I don’t need tabs. I also turn off all window decorations, so my terminal content gets 100% of the terminal’s screen real estate-- so I don't need a native UI. All that said, it looks like Ghosty can be configured to match this setup, so I’ll give it a try. I just wanted to mention Foot to anyone who is running Linux. Foot is a simple, focused project.

I am a happy foot user and I am considering switching from Sway to Niri. What has been your experience with Niri? One thing that concerns me about Niri is that it is not wlroots based. This means that many tools I accustomed to don't work with Niri. Do you have some dedicated tools for screen sharing, screen recording, screen printing, multi-monitor management, ...?

What I like about foot is the heuristics governing text selection with the mouse. I find that more often than not, if I double click with the mouse on some text, what it ends up selecting is just the part I need.

Is it weird that I never considered foot because of the name? At least when you say "alacritty" i understand that it's a terminal. When I tell someone I use "foot"... I don't know, it doesn't give a good feeling.

Already in homebrew if you want to use that!

I'm very new to Ghostty and went looking for my favorite theme "Solarized Light"; it's listed as "iTerm2 Solarized Light" -- in contrast (heh) to "Solarized Dark"

Thanks for this lead - i eventually figured out there's 7 options:

    $ ghostty +list-themes
    /solari
    <... lists 7 options ...>

And then in the ghostty config i could:

    theme = dark:Builtin Solarized Dark,light:Builtin Solarized Light

The author has a dev log I’d recommend if you’re curious about what makes it different + general goodies on Zig/terminal emulators.

https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

When I try to ssh into one of my servers using this terminal I get the following:

  missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty
  Connection to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx closed.

(IP address removed by me.)

It turned out that this is associated with how I automatically run tmux by having the following kind of config for how I connect to that server.

  Host server3000
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/host_specific/foo/bar/server3000/id_ed25519_baz
   RequestTTY yes
   RemoteCommand /usr/bin/env tmux new-session -A -s '%L'

Whereas if I outcomment the RemoteCommand setting in my ~/.ssh/config of the laptop I'm connecting form, I can connect fine even using Ghostty as my terminal and from

  env | grep ^TERM=

I get output

  TERM=xterm-256color

in the initial normal shell.

And if I run tmux, then inside of it from

  env | grep ^TERM=

I get output

  TERM=tmux-256color

So there seems to be some termcap stuff I'd have to figure out if I want to use Ghostty and still be able to run tmux automatically in the way I'm currently doing without problem when using the Terminal that ships with macOS and ssh'ing into my servers.

https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

I tried to install and play around with it, it's really nice.

Took a bit of tinkering to set a theme and my favourite Pragmata Pro, but what ultimately annoys me is the lack of 'turnkey' selecting for text.

When I run `Cmd + A`, I want my terminal to make a full text selection of an entered command, not of the screen content. Or when I run `Option + Shift + Arrow left/right`, I want to select words from an entered command, not to type '4D;4C;4D;4C'.

I'm not a vimer or emacser, I want to have normal macos experience. For this reason alone I thought it's too early to switch and Warp is still great for me.

Cmd+A to select the entered command isn't standard.

You could try:

- Ctrl+A: Move to the beginning of the line.

- Ctrl+E: Move to the end of the line.

- Ctrl+K: Cut the command from the cursor position to the end.

- Ctrl+U: Cut the command from the cursor to the beginning of the line.

- Ctrl+Y: Paste the text back.

This should work in all terminals.

Good ideas (and possible in Wezterm if shell marks the semantic zones, not sure whether possible if not), though not really a normal macos experience given mac's default terminal doesn't select of an entered command on Cmd+A

But `ghostty +list-themes` is damn impressive.

I'm very excited to have this because it's the first bit of high quality open source software to hit the streets in a while.

I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future.

Thank you, Mitchell!

[0] https://ladybird.org/

> I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future.

That's a weird statement. I've been running a free, open-source and subscription-less browser (firefox) and terminal emulator (many) for close to 20 years.

Actually I like what ladybird is doing in the browser space, given firefox is quite dependent on google cash. But this is just yet another terminal emulator in a sea of them. The only two distinguishing features I can see are hype and native UI (which mac users care about for some reason -- my native UI is a borderless rectangle in tiling WM).

>first bit of high quality open source software

That feels like an exaggregation. L High quality open source software is uploaded daily to GitHub.

What was the last one? Ghidra?

So I will see how well it works on FreeBSD, but I love the development model, keeping it "closed" for the 1.0 (focus and polish), I have not tested it yet, but it already "feels" like professional engineering work.

source is open https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

Cool to finally see a 1.0 release of Ghostty! Will definitely check it out. One very strange and niche question though, do you support font switching with SGR escape codes? After the Monaspace font family was released I made a PR to Vim to support highlighting by font switching, but I've yet to find a terminal emulator to my liking that supports it. I'm building an eink laptop and its monochrome display requires some neat tricks like this to get the most out of the device.

Any love for Windows. I'm getting restless to ditch putty but unable to find any good emulator that has select and login style of management screen.

I've been happy enough with Microsoft Terminal instead of PuTTY (and I appreciate the open source github repo). If you're comfortable with editing JSON files, you can save the SSH connections as profiles so you can click to open a new tab to whatever SSH session (or WSL setup, or Powershell setup) you want. Example: https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-custom-ssh-pr...

Apparently it works great on WSL

See this other user's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518033

When on windows I have been happy with WezTerm

I ditched putty a long time ago. Conemu is better than putty these days (latest Windows 10 or Windows 11 if you’re unlucky enough).

I don’t like the “feel” of the new Windows Terminal “app” but it is more “modern” and “capable” (running a newer conhost under the hood).

But if you’re willing to use non-standard software then WezTerm, Alacritty, and Kitty (WSL with an XServer) are all good options.

> Windows support is planned after the 1.0 release.

This really does aim to be the terminal for all.

> For example, on macOS, Ghostty supports Quick Look, force touch, the macOS secure input API, built-in window state recovery on restart, etc. These are all native APIs provided by macOS that don't have equivalents in Linux desktop environments.

I believe window state recovery has some approximate equivalent in GNOME and KDE, but maybe not exactly the same (and I don't know how easy it is to integrate with).

On X11, Gnome and KDE Plasma supported session/state restore, but this was based on XSMP and couldn't be simply reused for Wayland.

There's an ongoing standardization effort to provide equivalent functionality for Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

KDE Plasma provides a "fake session restore" for the time being: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...

I assume this is mostly a mac thing? The effort to get this up and running on debian appears to be a bit more work than normal.

I imagine package managers will start picking this up shortly since it just released publicly.

$ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git

$ cd ghostty

$ zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

$ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty

it's a Mac and Linux thing.

Yeah, it's not available in the Debian/Ubuntu package managers, but building from source is quite trivial.

> Split Right | Split Down

Thanks for this. After 7 years of using iterm2 I still don't know what will happen with the ambiguous "Split Horizontally | Split Vertically". I know the issue is I'm thinking about it and should just learn it, but it would be more helpful if it was named "Split A | Split B".

(might be a non-native language problem)

I’m a native English speaker and I also have trouble with this. When the panes are arranged horizontally, the line dividing them is vertical.

I think it ambiguous. vim has vsplit ("Like |:split|, but split vertically.") that is "split right", however, wezterm has "Split Vertically (Top/Bottom). Split the current pane vertically into two panes, by spawning the default program into the bottom half"

I went to ghostty.org and spent a long time staring at that animated ghost, and thought of clippy. Except this guy seems to have wider range of emotions.

Anyways, I eventually learned this was about a terminal emulator (which is awesome), but the ghost on the front page really inspired my imagination. I think it would be a good thing to have some kind of companion like that, when it's me, by myself, constantly surrounded by terminals all day. Is the choice of having the ghost be rendered in a text-mode terminal important? I think it is for me.

I have a traumatic experience with GPU-based GUI. Long time ago I tried to run Ubuntu in a VM, and they switched to GPU-based rendering. But as VM doesn't have a GPU, the system fell back to something called "llvmpipe". The result was that the widgets reacted approximately with 30 second lag to every action.

So what I am asking, if you are making a GPU-based rendering toolkit, please write also SIMD software fallback without shaders. Remember how fast Windows 95 was and make it a little bit faster.

I am asking this in good faith

Why would you not ssh?

What am I missing? Can someone please explain what reason there is to switch/build a new terminal when we can use e.g. iTerm ?

I was using iTerm up until about a week ago when I unboxed a new Mac and decided to test out alternatives while setting it up. Ghostty wasn't out yet so I started with Wezterm, and was shocked to find how much it's speed improved my terminal experience. Typing latency is much better in nvim, and scrolling is vastly improved in nvim and tmux.

Ghostty feels like a Mac app like iTerm2 while being fast and having fewer features. Wezterm feels more like an app ported from Linux, but has a much richer config system and features like build-in multiplexing which means it's replaced tmux for me - while keeping all my tmux keybinds.

I'm still using the built in MacOS terminal. What am I missing? I mostly do webdev - maybe terminal features are more important for other types of programming?

Proper text-based configuration made me switch from iTerm to WezTerm, and i’ll give this a try as well :)

Why create new art when we already have galleries full of it?

Iterm is slow

Yeah or vscode integrated bash?

Why is the CLI args so weird with the + sign?

To people who tried using it, what are the reasons to use it over iTerm2?

It’s fast. In the same league as Alacritty and Wezterm, which is to say on the doom fire benchmark those terminals can do 500fps plus, where iTerm2 does 90fps on my M4 MacBook Pro. In practical terms if you use tmux or vim in the terminal, it makes a big difference for typing latency and scrolling.

I am not a very adept terminal user. I just hook in to tmux. So all emulators are basically the same for me. Switching windows in tmux is much faster than clicking on tabs. ghostty at least looks much nicer. It has a lot of built in fonts and themes. Command line editing is similar. Man pages for some reason are very slow to open in iterm2, but that isn't the case here. The only deal breaker for me is that it takes up a lot of cpu (in macbook air). Unless there is a simple, non-consequential config to change that will fix this, I will stay with iterm for now.

I tried it but I just can't jump since it doesn't have support the global hotkey to autofocus iterm that I'm so used to.

I tried using their toggle_visibility keybind but it's a bit wonky since it doesn't return focus back to another window when you toggle away.

I took this for a spin today. Coming from a long-time iTerm2 user, the first thing I noticed was how snappy everything feels, especially when resizing the window. The straight-forward configuration was extremely nice as well and can be stored in my dotfiles now (iTerm was a giant dump of XML).

A few things that keep me from switching to it full time:

- Missing search scrollback (cmd+f). This appears to be coming soon: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

- More of a nitpick than anything, but the only way to disable cursor blinking is to disable shell integration. Unfortunately, this means taking away things like native scrolling and likely some other things I don't know about. I see there is a discussion here to possibly address this: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812

I feel like this would be a no-brainer switch for me once the above are addressed.

Looks interesting. I'm playing around with it on Linux (with Xfce), but can't figure out how to get rid of the CSD header bar / hamburger menu and use a normal menu bar instead. I see Mac screenshots with a normal Mac-style menu bar, but I don't see how to enable the equivalent on Linux. The `window-theme` and `window-decoration` options do not seem to do anything.

They should work if you exit and restart ghostty.

- xterm still feel faster to me.

- some visual artifacts with the gtk menu

- sometimes prompt got clear when openning 2nd / 3rd windows

- cant get keybinding quick toggle to work

> - some visual artifacts with the gtk menu

You need a compositor. picom works.

For a proper "native i3 experience" I recommend setting gtk-titlebar=false and unbinding tab/pane management keybinds. I already have a window manager, I don't need a second one.

I also had to disable adwaita because when it's enabled closing a shell with ^D closes all open windows, sometimes it leaves an empty window instead.

> - xterm still feel faster to me.

lxterminal also launches 6 times faster, I guess on a slow laptop without a dedicated GPU these terminals are not the most efficient option.

In case you mean the quick terminal (ctrl+`):

    keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal

Have set it up with Nushell. It’s pretty fast while displaying really long log files. Going to sit alongside iTerm2 until I get comfortable with it.

The only things I miss are (1) right click to copy paste selection (akin to Putty), and (2) profiles (I work with different shells depending on my projects and use Profiles frequently on iTerm2)

In case anyone is wondering, this terminal appears to work just great on windows by using WSLg.

I installed on linux inside WSL, then launched it, and it looks/works great. Clipboard also works.

Thanks! I did it, but I'm having problems with window resizing and mouse selection. When I try to resize the window, the actual window is smaller than it appears. Did you encounter the same issue? Related issues:

https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/633

Did you have to build it? On which OS?

I just want to say thanks for the minimum-contrast option: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#minimum-contrast

I've grown so sick of tools/TUIs that output unreadable text (like Debian's ls that defaults to dark-blue-on-black for directories). I look forward to never manually theming a terminal app again!

Another goodie is selection-foreground and selection-background config to set the colour for highlight selection, makes a massive difference when it's something you can choose rather than the translucent crap on mac, or the defaults on Windows/Linux.

This is great. I’m middle aged and I’ve definitely noticed my eyesight needs more and more help in the contrast dept

thanks for sharing

Congratulations!

I was hoping 1.0 would mean CMD+F search would work, but looks like that was pushed back to a later release unfortunately.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomme...

Does it support Ctrl+Scroll to zoom? Somehow I got used to this years ago and unfortunately not a lot of software supports it. Have been using Wezterm until now, which does.

That's usually a feature of the Desktop Environment. If you configure it there then it works everywhere.

Looks great. Eagerly waiting to be able to "Use Left Option as Esc+" like iTerm has. Without it, it is nearly impossible to use Emacs.

Look for `macos-option-as-alt`. The Ghostty docs use the term "Alt" here to mean using the key as a terminal input modifier rather than for macOS text input. This setting allows you to specify only one option key to use this behavior for.

Was just looking for how to configure this globally. You can create a keybind for every key[0][1] but that's a bit silly faff nonsense in current year 2024.

[0] e.g. `keybind = alt+f=esc:f`

[1] Which affects both option keys, sadly.

I have this as a system-wide mapping with Karabiner. Complex modifications, "Post esc if left_alt is pressed alone".

There's never a time when I wouldn't want this to work, may as well enable it everywhere.

Edit: It looks like I misunderstood what that setting in iTerm does. But hey if you do want left option to send Esc by itself, that's how to get it.

Upon installing this, I went straight for this part of the documentation:

https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-f...

Unfortunately the "tabs not working in non-native fullscreen" thing is a dealbreaker for me, so I will be switching back to iTerm 2.

But Ghostty as a whole looks promising. I like zig, zig-objc, MIT license, libghostty, config via text file. I will check back every month or so because I really want to use this. But my hate for macOS native fullscreen outweighs everything else.

Edit: Ok here we go, this is why it's not implemented: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomme...

There's more than one workaround which is superior in my opinion: https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png

IIRC you can even use AppKit to remove the close/minimize/fullscreen buttons, so it would just be a blank bar.

You could go a step further and use private APIs / objc runtime voodoo to set the height of the titlebar to 0. That might outside your design philosophy though.

Also, FYI, clicking the green fullscreen button still uses macOS native fullscreen, so you definitely want to disable that button (which is a public AppKit API) when you have that option enabled

Looks nice, but the Quick Terminal isn't instant, so I'll stick with iTerm2.

iTerm2 isn't instant either, but they feel about the same[0], although with iTerm2 the full screen Quake-mode (Quick Terminal equivalent) hides the MacOS menu bar, and Ghostty doesn't.

For my taste, I want a full screen terminal, with no menu bar, no delay, and no animations, which I can toggle with a global hotkey.

[0]: Actually, scratch that. I tested again, and iTerm2 opens more quickly.

Just want to share what I just realised, but the author is no one else than the mitchell hashimoto from hashicorp, so not exactly a newbie ! Would it have killed you to let us poor 99% have a bit of fun releasing useful projects too? (And also reach a bit of your determination, skill and talent)? (no, really, kudos, well done and thanks)

Love this in theory but the first time user experience could be improved:

$ brew install ghostty

Launch it, don't configure anything, in the new terminal window then enter:

$ lazydocker

Response: 2024/12/28 09:04:42 An error occurred! Please create an issue at https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues

*exec.ExitError exit status 1 /home/runner/work/lazydocker/lazydocker/main.go:96 (0x9397d7) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/internal/atomic/types.go:194 (0x43bc1b) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:1650 (0x46b9e1)

Which does not happen with fresh out of the box Mac Terminals, iTerm.

Probably it would be good to have less specific default options for people who just want to try it out before starting to configure it.

That’s a problem with lazydocker, not ghostty.

Maybe contribute to https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues/610 ?

My takeaway is that it's mostly useful for apple stuff-- why would "platform native" matter on Linux?

You should try it.

I'm on Linux, and first impression is ghostty is really good. Speed in particular is impressive.

This is very nice! How do I work around remote SSH shells complaining like `Error opening terminal: xterm-ghostty`?

https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh

https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

Compiled ok but crashed upon execution:

    info: ghostty version=1.0.1-main+a8e5eef1
    info: ghostty build optimize=ReleaseFast
    info: runtime=apprt.Runtime.gtk
    info: font_backend=font.main.Backend.fontconfig_freetype
    info: dependency harfbuzz=8.4.0
    info: dependency fontconfig=21402
    info: renderer=renderer.OpenGL
    info: libxev backend=main.Backend.io_uring
    info(os): setlocale from env result=en_US.utf8
    info(gtk): GTK version build=4.6.9 runtime=4.6.9
    info: optional config file not found, not loading path=/home/xxxx/.config/ghostty/config
    info(config): default shell source=env value=/usr/bin/bash
    "vulkan-disable" is only available when building GTK with G_ENABLE_DEBUG. See GDK_DEBUG=help
    info(gtk): libadwaita version build=1.1.7 runtime=1.1.7

    (process:164888): Adwaita-WARNING **: 19:33:13.357: Using GtkSettings:gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme with libadwaita is unsupported. Please use AdwStyleManager:color-scheme instead.
    error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such method “ReadOne”
    info(grid): loaded OpenGL 3.2
    warning(grid): OpenGL version is too old. Ghostty requires OpenGL 3.3
    error(gtk_surface): surface failed to realize: error.OpenGLOutdated
    info(sentry): sentry envelope does not contain crash, discarding

System:

    OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64 
    Host: 20QVCTO1WW ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd 
    Kernel: 6.9.3-76060903-generic 
    Uptime: 2 hours, 20 mins 
    Packages: 5314 (dpkg), 22 (flatpak) 
    Shell: bash 5.1.16 
    Resolution: 3840x2160 
    DE: Plasma 5.25.5 
    WM: KWin 
    WM Theme: Breeze 
    Theme: [Plasma], Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3] 
    Icons: Papirus-Dark [Plasma], Papirus-Dark [GTK2/3] 
    Terminal: konsole 
    Terminal Font: JetBrains Mono 11 
    CPU: Intel i7-9750H (12) @ 4.500GHz 
    GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q 
    GPU: Intel CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] 
    Memory: 6307MiB / 31738MiB

You have OpenGL 3.2 but need 3.3

Also same issue. Seems it’s using a bleeding edge OpenGL ES that even nVidia drivers don’t support.

I might give this a shot but using GTK4 makes me think this won’t live up to the “native” claim on Linux. It will likely feel out of place on non-GTK DEs with KDE being the big one. And yes, I did read the about page disclaimer about Linux but strongly disagree about calling GTK4 the closest thing. That’s a very GNOME-centric view (e.g., ignores the rest of the Linux ecosystem) and makes me worry that any issues on other DEs will be ignored/deprioritized. It’s possible that I’m wrong and that a sizable population of the closed beta Linux users we’re on KDE, but without knowing, I’m very hesitant and put back by the “native” claim (it feels disingenuous).

It is almost impressive how much worse a GTK4/Adwaita application is compared to a GTK2 application. I just tried this and it has a fucking hamburger menu in a desktop application. If that ever becomes what is considered "native" on Linux I will abandon it after using it for 25 years.

FWIW I just tried on KDE (built from source on NixOS) and had some weird cursor dpi issues and GDK errors. Looks like it is tailored more for GTK-based DEs for now.

Does "native" exist on Linux, in your opinion? Feels to me like both QT and GTK (and maybe iced if cosmic comes to fruition?) could be considered native (or none of them can, depending on your point of view).

GTK-based desktop environments: GNOME, Pantheon, MATE, Xfce, Cinnamon

Qt-based desktop environments: KDE, LXQt

Iced-based desktop environments: COSMIC

By going GTK, you support 5 desktop environments. If you really don't like GTK, just build a Qt app runtime with libghostty. Lots of people want a Qt version.

Looks really out of place for me on KDE, big fat gnome title bar and buttons etc...

Gnome is becoming the de-facto Linux DE. It's standard on Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Suse and Debian.

KDE is standard on what, Steam deck? Every enterprise-y distro ditched it some time ago...

Is there a way to restore session (windows, tabs, paths) after (application) start? How is this not default everywhere is beyond me (looking at Firefox).

But my main point here would be that the lack of explorable configuration, and the docs not having any search, make it quite challenging search for this.

Are you saying Firefox doesn’t restore state?

Nice addition.

Slightly more CPU heavy than Kitty.

in MacOS yabai tiling manager has problems dealing with native tabs, that's gonna annoy me like with Finder.

also in MacOS try pressing "Cmd + Shift + \", also works in Finder, it's there, it's cool, but I never use it.

That's neat but how do I select a panel afterwards? Arrow keys do nothing and hjkl start a search.

I've been using Alacritty so I can switch back and forth from my work's Mac to my own Linux, and share the config, but I'm testing Ghostty and I'm really liking it. And no silly closed AI somethingsomething integration.

Any Alacritry users have opinions on this? I've been waiting for its release and am looking forward to trying it. Wonder what the big differences are?

I mostly appreciate Alacritty's simplicity and use tmux to manage multiple windows/panes.

You should also check out Wezterm too and see which one you like more. I ported my tmux keybinds to Wezterm - including vim-tmux-navigator style ctrl+{h,j,k,l} for navigating between nvim splits and Wezterm splits, ctrl-a as tmux leader. Getting tmux out of the way between terminal and nvim noticably improved scroll feeling in nvim and just in shell scrollback too.

I styled Wezterm's tabs to look just like my tmux tab bar too, there's no visual difference for me between a Wezterm window with Wezterm tabs, and a Wezterm window with tmux tabs. If you're more of a terminal native than a Mac native, I think you'd enjoy it.

My wezterm config: https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/new/config/wezterm...

I tested it out really quickly, and something is off with Ghostty's font rendering on my machine -- there's extra vertical space between lines. I didn't see any config options for adjusting the line height, just things like `adjust-cell-height`, which squished the whole font, and `adjust-font-baseline`, which moved everything up.

I tried a few searches ('line height', 'vertical spacing') on the GH issues for the project [1], but didn't see anything. I'm sure it's a simple config option or something with my font, but it works out-of-the-box on Alacritty + xterm and others.

I might file an issue if I can nail it down a bit more.

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues

I was using urxvt for about 10 years and then I switched to alacritty about 5 years ago. Have had the best experience with alacritty- runs on all my systems, super fast, config is great. That being said, I’m gonna give ghostty a well-deserved test drive. I like it a lot so far. Love seeing more zig apps!

In my experience, Alacritty had a few bugs / unimplemented features that broke certain TUIs. Ghostty seems to be the most complete / least broken terminal emulator.

Been trying it out for a few hours and love it! One feature that I do miss from Kitty is the cursor trail when your cursor moves in a buffer. Excited to see what Ghostty does in the future and thank you for a great new terminal!

Cursor trail?

I've been using Kitty since just about the beginning and didn't know it did that!

Edit. Oh I see it's a really recent addition. I'll definitely be taking that for a spin.

Congrats! I’m curious what the main reason is you ended up going with the MIT license over GPL. Is it because of potentially integrating Ghostty with VS Code like you mentioned during Zig showtime a year ago?

I'm also interested in why the MIT license was chosen. I guess it's because of the plan to create 'libghostty'?

This product just breathes craftsmanship and love. Respect and thank you!

It's the first terminal app that made me switch from Terminal.app on my Mac. It gets basically everything right, and doesn't try to have every feature. Fantastic work, thank you!

To be honest, I don't "get" ghostty. I am not really seeing how this is so much better than the GNOME terminal that ships with my Linux distro.

A lot of people are claiming that ghostty is "faster." I watched the lightning talk where the author claims that catting files and binaries is faster.

I tried this against ghostty itself after building with zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast, using: time cat ghostty.

In GNOME terminal, it took 3.340s. In ghostty, it took 16.947s. I must be doing something wrong?

The cool part is that you don’t have to “get” Ghostty, you can continue using whatever you prefer

Are there any use cases for running `cat` on a binary without at least piping it somewhere? The output will be mostly garbage

As someone who uses the default terminal app, I'm curious to learn about other people's use-cases where the choice of terminal app makes a difference and how.

Very impressed with ghostty so far, but: Main reasons for sticking with ITerm2 (for the moment at least):

- "Seamless" cut & paste with paste on "2 X right click" + "Trim trailing LF"

- Quadruple click "Smart selection"

- Brillant search with highlighting in text and scrollbar

- Support for OSC-1 "icon titles" in tabs, as opposed to OSC-0 "header title"

Lack of true colour support was the first thing that got me looking at other options

I really like to copy on select in the terminal. Terminal.app used to have a hack available to add this feature in, but since SIP days, it is no longer possible.

My most used "unique" feture of WezTerm and one of the main reasons I'd struggle to move to any of the alternatives is quick select mode[0] which massively speeds up copying or typing file names, hashes, IDs, etc. from the output of commands.

[0] https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/quickselect.html

I am not sure how to answer this.

Why choose a non-default anything? It feels like deeper down, you’re asking why anyone chooses anything.

These terminal emulators all behave slightly differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are configurable. Some are programmable. Some feel “right”. Others can be made to feel “right”. Etc.

Why use any non-default application? Same answer for terminal emulators.

This is by far the best terminal emulator I've ever used.

Just packaged Ghostty for Debian.

https://github.com/clayrisser/debian-ghostty

I've tried it out and I can notice that ghostty is a little more snappy than Alacritty. I was happy with Alacritty, but I used a face a weird issue where the whole terminal freezes. I'm not sure if this is a Alacritty issue or tmux issue. I can only confirm this by using Ghostty and checking if the same issue happens.

Anyways this is a great piece of software. I've never been this hyped for a software ever before. Great work team.

Does Ghostty support TiteInhibit? The docs say "if xterm does something we should do it", but I don't see any mention of "tite".

Neat, this [1] looks like the project uses vttest [2] to test DEC VT terminal compatibility?

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md

[2] https://invisible-island.net/vttest/

I'm excited about the fact that this is written in Zig. I'm a Kitty user at the moment, but if this delivers I'll change to Ghostty.

this is way better than using warp (ai gen terminal).

i'd rather use a nice-looking and well designed (UX) terminal than have to use a clunky ai native one.

Warp has been around since 2020, i.e. since before the generative AI craze took off.

Every HN thread about it that I've seen has been full of comments that boil down to "this seems cool but I refuse to use a terminal emulator that's full of telemetry and requires sign-in."

And of course the VC-funded terminal emulator has AI shoehorned in now. I shouldn't be so surprised.

tldr: you're setting a low bar

Everything about it is so polished, it’s hard to believe it’s just a v1.0.0 release!

The only thing I’m eagerly waiting for now is the implementation of search [1], but otherwise, it’s absolutely stellar.!

I set Ghostty as my default terminal emulator now.

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

I've been in the beta for quite a while, the only issues I had were resolved quite quickly. I never got to contribute that much in feedback since I honestly never had anything to complain about, outside of not being able to also use ghostty on Windows (lol).

Congrats on 1.0! It's been a joy to use I wish everyone can enjoy this wonderful piece of software as much as I have!

I love the terminal. But I'm seeing relatively high CPU usage. Maybe there's some non default setting that can reduce that?

Are you perhaps hitting this KDE bug? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497341

Took me only ten minutes to tweak the config to my liking and recreate my color scheme from iterm.

I’ve been using Ghostty for a day now and it simply works. Smooth, seamless and perfectly integrated to the point where this should just be the default terminal in macOS.

P.S.: If you want to port your iterm color scheme, set:

window-colorspace = display-p3

for the colors to match.

(And bold-is-bright = true if you set this option in iterm)

Overall nice, but I'm bummed to be running into some bugs regarding a few key binding assignments. Though, I could just be missing something due to the somewhat spartan docs.

Given all the time and hype, I'd have hoped that wrinkles like this would've been ironed out by launch time.

Back to Wezterm for now, but I'll certainly be checking back in at some point.

Great stuff! Does it have a Session/Workspace concept? Maybe we can learn from how Alacritty does it integrating with tmux?

Since this has some plans for being the best, will it add the great unique feature of wezterm: scripting config support?

Awesome, I have been waiting for this since you originally announced it. I also enjoyed the blog posts.

I ran into some funkiness once I ssh’d into a FreeBSD box. The shell history was wonky, and goaccess wouldn’t launch at all, complaining about the terminal environment, which I’ve never seen. With that said, this looks like an awesome project and I’ll be following it closely!

https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh

Looks pretty cool! Unfortunately I can't use it yet, as I am on a Ubuntu-based distro (Pop! OS 22.04), so my GTK version is not high enough. I imaging that's the case for a lot of people who stick to LTS versions. I may check it out on my Mac for work though

Has anyone put up an Arch Aur yet ?

AUR not even needed https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty

I wonder how the colour rendering is. Usually when I configure some editor in a terminal to use specific #rrggbb 24bit colours I like, the end result does not render the same as in non-terminal software (confirmed in the past with an eye-dropper tool).

Congratulations on making it to the launch!

I really appreciate the levelheadedness of your responses regarding Ghostty, and how clear you are to be speaking positively for your thing instead of negatively about anyone else's.

Going to build it at lunch today and give it a shot :)

Could someone give me an idea why I would want to use this instead of any other terminal?

simplicity, feels zen-mode vs a lot of over-the-top-terminals these days

also (from the docs):

> Ghostty supports the Kitty graphics protocol, light/dark mode notifications, hyperlinks, and more. This lets terminal applications like Neovim, Zellij, and others do more than they could in other terminal emulators.

Application features are higher-level features that are useful for interacting with the terminal emulator itself. For example, Ghostty supports native tabs, splits, a drop-down terminal on macOS, theme switching on system dark/light mode, etc.

Same request. As someone who uses the standard Teriminal application on my MBP I'm wondering what benefits I might find from Ghostty

Real nice so far.

The fact it does its own window decoration is a bit of a turn-off, but:

A quick test of speed against wezterm and gnome-terminal show ghostty (on my laptop) to be around 3 times faster than both of the other.

Will definitely try it for a couple of weeks.

So i've basically been a terminal.app purist, but downloaded ghostty on a whim because of all the excitement...

I did not realize it would be THAT much faster. I guess I should have started using better terminals earlier

I wonder if there is any equivalent of 'iterm2 broadcast input' in ghostty. I use this pattern to deploy same application on multiple servers or checking logs on multiple servers for same service.

Warp has been meeting all my needs other than tab switching behavior. It's not open source but the UX is great.

Switched from WezTerm which was working cross platform but not quite as good.

Both are low latency and written in Rust.

nixpkgs PR: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/368404

Corresponding Nixpkgs-Tracker link, to track if it's merged into your branches of interest: https://nixpkgs-tracker.ocfox.me/?pr=368404

The default macOS terminal app has CMD UP/DOWN to move to previous prompts. This is one of my pet peeves about terminal apps, they seem to lack this command?

Ghostty supports it (like many other terminals) - it is called shell integration and it is supposed to be enabled by default, just like in Terminal.app.

It works for me with cmd+shift+up/down. I had it set up with the iterm2 shell integration and it just worked.

Not even cmd up/down, just hit up/down key, no cmd needed

This happens to be exactly what I was looking for in a Terminal app. Native UI, fast, and native screen splitting, doesn't try to do too much. Five stars

Does this support the non-standard key-press, key-release, etc. events proposal by kitty project? They are necessary for nicer terminal UI projects.

Yes.

Genuinely excited to see this land! Can't wait to try it out. This could be the last piece of the puzzle to a nearly flawless terminal experience

There are MANY problems with the default configuration. For example, the UP/DOWN key doesn't work, the TERM is xterm-ghostly...

I would love to try but it doesn’t support Monterey

I wanted something as fast as Alacritty that had native tabs, could divide horizontal/vertical without tmux. And this seems like it!

General question, how safe is it to use non-stock os terminals? In the end often they need to receiver super user at some point.

I would say it's about as safe as using any other program. On Linux, by default you will not get any isolation within the same user context. So if your account has access to sudo (regardless whether with password or not), assume that any program you've ever run on that account also has sudo access. There are sandboxes and selinux but neither is used consistently enough on consumer systems.

This is such a cool project, looks amazing!

For some reasons, the font looks thinner compare to Kitty on macOS. Not sure if it is a bug or intentional.

Yes, it is. Try setting font-thicken = true https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#font-thicken

Startup time was very bad until I disabled adwaita with

    gtk-adwaita = false

Will the eventual windows release support GPU shaders like Windows terminal does?

Looks awesome, amazing work!

Any particular/strong reason for choosing Zig for this?

Wow, I had no idea ghostty was this much of a big deal. Really cool!

anyone know if this can be plugged into vscode to replace xtermjs?

I tried and it looks really nice, best christmas gift this year

Congrats on the release! I'm excited to try this out.

Should of used QT.

> error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop was not provided by any .service files

What's the elevator pitch vs other terminals?

i use the base mac/Windows terminals and have never had any issues. what are the main things that draw people to alternatives?

Nice work! How does this compare to Warp?

Congratulations

thanks Mitchell for all the hard work, it's nice to see quality and competition in this field

I have honestly been so excited to try this after listening to several videos of mitchell talking about his work. What a christmas present!

A terminal is so dear to us software engineers, and this seems like such a love declaration to the terminal.

Time to spend hours tuning my config!

how to set tabs to vertical view like in iterm2 ? i googled a lot, but didn't find any

how to set tabs to vertical left view like in iterm2?

also how to set color\name to the particular tab?

looks really cool! i'm gonna play with it, thanks for this awesome project

Does this have sixel support?

any tips on how to install it if you have nix (without nixos)?

text is missing left padding on macOS otherwise nice

any nix users aware of a derivation?

You can downvote this but Why they never put a single screen shots !

Beautiful

Is there a bounty for zero days?

I’ve been very disappointed with Alacritty (no support for split term in favor of tmux) and WezTerm (insane config format, config has no business using a full fledged programming language) feature wise, so I have high hopes regarding Ghostty, can’t wait to try it!

No cmd+f / ctrl+f ??

I'm sorry what?

Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever.

For those who don’t have the background:

- created by Mitchell (founder of HashiCorp)

- it’s developed in Zig (and Mitchell recently pledge $300k to Zig foundation)

- uses native UI (which is super rare for cross platform app)

- amazingly performant. e.g. https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362

- has lots of amazing small details like below

https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500

https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113443002518588524

https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113166930440000852

This has been a passion project of his for the past 2-years and he’s completely MIT open sourced it. He’s spent a lot of time thinking and ensuring this project can persist in the future even without him.

Many people have tremendous respect for Mitchell’s technical abilities, as well as hugely respect how he operates (genuinely nice person and thinks about things long-term and does the hard work for sustainability).

Lots more to read at: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming

Landing page and github README could improve:

- picture or gif is worth a thousand word

- it mentioned its cross-platform but I don't see support for Windows or Android - its better make it explicit it's only for macOS and Linux. Yesterday was looking for some nicer terminal on Android and was hoping ghostty could work.

- I like simple landing pages but this... is too simple and not much useful (only 2 buttons and ASCII image. Why even bother with such landing page and not just stick with github README?

- it doesn't provide me any fast information how to compares to different terminals and why I should switch from Warp

I have been waiting to try this out for sometime now. I recently tried various terminal emulator tools and I settled on wave terminal. This is a list of these tools for reference. I would list tools that are on both MacOS and Linux which is comparable to this new emulator. But also because I did not try any on windows.

- Alacritty (https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty)

- waveterminal (https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm)

- Hyber (https://github.com/zeit/hyper)

- Kitty (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty)

- Rio (https://github.com/raphamorim/rio)

- Tabby (https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby)

- Wezterm(https://github.com/wez/wezterm)

- Contour (https://contour-terminal.org)

- Extraterm (https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm)

- Warp (https://www.warp.dev/)

I didn't like that Warp is VC product as I don't like essential tool like a terminal in my workflow to be dependent on proprietary VC product.

We've added Ghostty to the terminals section of Terminal Trove for comparison.

https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ghostty/

You can find all terminals for comparison below and also the list of terminals (including Ghostty)

https://terminaltrove.com/compare/terminals/

https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/

I dunno if this was obvious to everyone but OP is one of the founders of Hashicorp

> support native GUIs for configuration in line with our native UI philosophy

As a terminal emulator, running and building it from source in Wayland as a passive process that exists in the shell, while being a method of input-output system call management.

[flagged]

no windows version?

The little it says about what this even is seems to be wrong. This is not cross-platform at all

It's pretty slow and buggy for me idk

Is it mining cryto? Caused my mac to slow down, CPU usage shot up to 100%, and it dropped right down after I quit it.

You mentioned that Ghostty gets around 500 FPS, but I tested it myself and only got 160 FPS on M1 Pro (WezTerm gets 400 FPS). What can be the reason?

Sadly another terminal that doesn't seem to support "Quake style" dropdown (that I can find)

Having my terminal session available on a hotkey has become a critical part of my workflow

Could GPT5 or Claude written this from scratch?

> Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator

Doesn't have a binary for Windows so it's not "cross-platform" yet.

Am I the only person wondering why we need 100 terminal emulators when there are only 2 or 3 solutions to using command line tools more like a REPL? (to some degree warp, some bash support in hydrogen, advanced edit mode of powershell) I don't care for using "fancy" TUIs all i want is better tooling to interact with these that does not feel like 1970 and more like the chrome console.

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