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Comment by retrofuturism | Hacker News Reader

I recently gave Ghostty a chance and have since switched over from iTerm2 completely. It's very familiar and polished.

Probably worth noting that Ghostty was very recently vulnerable to an old/familiar class of terminal vuln that bit a bunch of older terminal applications a while back: https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title

So moving to a newer / less "bloated" terminal may also just wind the clock back and cause you to encounter a similar sequence of vulns again, like some kind of unfortunate real-world "New Game Plus".

Having a vuln that many other terminal emulators have had is pretty different from the string of unique and extremely bad vulns that iTerm has had over the years. It’s possible that we’ll see similar from Ghostty, but it’s a much newer and I believe smaller codebase, so I’m willing to give it a second chance.

I've been using iTerm daily for something like a decade at this point and I'm struggling to think of any examples of this string of extremely bad vulns. There's this one, which is specific to SSH integration. There was CVE-2024-38396, which is the window title escape sequences I was talking about above.

What others am I missing?

How about making DNS requests for everything you hover over to determine if it’s a URL? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-leaks-...

A vuln every 7-8 years is "a string of unique and extremely bad vulns"?

I use iTerm2, mostly because that's what I'm used to: I installed it on my first Mac years ago when Terminal.app was really bad. I'm willing to switch to another terminal, but I don't see yet how iTerm2 is so much worse than the competition security-wise.

(I also don't understand the general animosity towards an opensource project with one developer doing all the work for 15 years.)

> A vuln every 7-8 years is "a string of unique and extremely bad vulns"?

Here’s another: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-patche...

And another: https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-19022/

Point being: it’s not hard to see what I’m talking about if you look up previous vulnerabilities in iTerm2, particularly around its sophisticated integration features. (I suppose I talk about this enough that it might be worth compiling all the history I’m aware of somewhere, I don’t want to sound like I’m just making this up)

It’s also notable that iTerm was found vulnerable to the same bug discovered recently in Ghostty: https://threatintelligencelab.com/blog/cve-2024-38396-a-crit...

> I also don't understand the general animosity towards an opensource project with one developer doing all the work for 15 years

I have nothing against George Nachman and iTerm2 is certainly an achievement, one that I probably couldn’t replicate myself. Nonetheless I feel the need to hold my terminal emulator to higher standards because it processes sensitive data and untrusted input with (inherently) poor isolation between the two. Until Ghostty I used Terminal.app for many years, having previously switched away from iTerm2 after the vulnerability discovered in 2017. That’s still what I recommend to people because it has a much smaller feature set and thus attack surface compared to iTerm.

I hope I didn´t sound like I did not believe you, I honestly had no idea. I don´t get an update for iTerm2 every week so I figured it was mostly stable / had no sec issue.

Following this discussion I decided to give Ghostty and kitty a try. I kept Ghostty, mainly because the shortcuts I use the most in iTerm2 are there and I like the default theme (yes, I'm a simple person.) It has less features / integrations I don´t use anyway so I guess the attack surface is smaller.

I can only find three CVEs prior to this. It's only one of those that I would qualify as "extremely bad" (the DNS query leak you mention below). The others are the window title bug GP mentions and the undocumented maintenance of a plain text search history file.

Ghostty has also been out for what, a week? So this is the open season / shakedown, when security researchers get to try out all the old favorites and see what got missed.

I don't think there are larger lessons to draw from that occurrence. A reputation for security has to be earned, and Ghostty hasn't been around long enough for that. From my vantage point it's on track, but only time will tell.

I'm not trying to knock either Ghostty in particular or new software in general. But the kind of "open season" phase you're referring to is basically the same point I'm making: new software still has to go through the phase where they work through their security model, have it probed by researchers, and earn their reputation.

Unfortunately, it's nowhere near close feature-wise just yet: proper quake mode, search, prompt navigation, line timestamps, tab output indicators, forced keyboard locales, customizable toolbar with user-defined variables/indicators, are all too useful to give up iTerm2 for anything.

What's not proper about Ghostty's quake mode?

It does not support tabs, for one.

What is "proper Quake mode"? Have you tried https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#toggle_qui...? (I don't have the habit to use this feature, but I'd like to!)

The others do sound useful too -- I personally hit a lot of spurious "tab output indicator" notifications in iTerm2, but if it _did_ work I could see how giving it up would be painful.

I got the toggle working, but couldn't get background transparency.

Proper quake mode is just one shortcut to show/hide the entire terminal window, otherwise the app is completely hidden from the app switcher and the dock. This also involves handling macOS keyboard-to-app layout mapper not reacting to this event as the window loses its first-class citizen status in this mode.

I tried iTerm’s quake mode after the Visor haxie for Terminal.app was shuttered, but unfortunately was left disappointed. Its behavior is kinda glitchy and inconsistent in comparison, which was surprising because one would expect a native feature to be better than one hacked in by a third party, but that was not the case here.

I tried Ghostty earlier in the week, but couldn’t get it set up to look the same as iterm2 (the colours are off and text looks different somehow with the same typeface at the same size). Which is just cosmetic but makes it feel wrong viscerally.

I’ll give it another go at the weekend.

Somehow this is the first time I see anyone else bring this up, but the fonts are absolutely displayed with wrong kerning on my mac, for my font (at 12pt) I was able to make it look the same as iTerm2 with adjust-cell-{width,height} both set to -5%.

I had an issue where Ghostty failed to render the text "th", so I think Ghostty just generally has a lot of font issues. Gave up trying to use it within minutes.

Ghostty supports iTerm themes, so you should be able to transfer your preferred look-and-feel directly. I just picked one I liked, so I'm not familiar with the process, but it can be done.

Could you please point to the docs about how to transfer iTerm2 themes to Ghostty? I couldn't find it.

It looks like the process is more manual than I thought, sorry. There's something which imports themes from the iTerm2 color schemes website weekly, but from what I can find that isn't a feature which ships with Ghostty itself.

Here's the relevant docs page, which I hope explains why I mistakenly thought that transferring a theme directly from iTerm to Ghostty was possible. You could upload your theme to the website they're being sourced from, and wait a week. But that's clearly not the same thing.

https://ghostty.org/docs/features/theme

I noticed the colors looked off when I was trying out Ghostty as well. Adding this line to my config fixed it after restarting the app: `window-colorspace = display-p3`

https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#window-colorspace

I used font-thicken = true and it looks pretty good, very similar to iTerm.

It seems that I had iTerm2 configured to display bold text as bright text (instead of bold). And I use bold, coloured text in my prompt, so that threw me.

I configured

    bold-is-bright = true

and suddenly everything looks fine. I'll see how I get on with it.

https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#bold-is-bright

I am using both at the moment, but iTerm has many, many features missing in ghostty. Most of them are not huge, but overall that’s a lot of paper cuts. Ultimately I wish both will stick around. Both have good ideas and I’d like them to keep evolving.

I tried Ghostty but the configuration file seems to be flakey. For example I wasn't able to turn off the cursor blinking in it (huge distraction for me) despite there being a configuration flag for it, it just wouldn't take it.

There's a known issue where the shell integration doesn't respect that setting when it sets the cursor shape. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812

Have you tried shell-integration-features = no-cursor ?

I also switched over to Ghostty, but now can't do Cmd+F to search for strings, I think it's on the roadmap though. Also, there are no scroll bars on the Mac version, which I guess is not that important for a terminal.

I did the same. Although, Ghostty doesn't seem to have support for Find (⌘-F), yet. Also, had some minor hiccups with it and tmux on remote hosts.

I've resorted to using Cmd-Shift-J (scrollback buffer) and grepping that, but its flaky about whether it will honor the command and emit a history file.

I tried Ctrl+r while she'd and it didn't work. Otherwise ghosty looked great

Does Ghostty support natural text editing like iTerm2 does?

Same. So far so good.

> It's very familiar...

It is? Because as far as I can tell it is deliberately quite different from iTerm2. No GUI for preferences, for instance.

Not knocking it, it's a great terminal. I wouldn't describe it as "familiar" though, unless you're switching from, say, WezTerm or Alacritty.

Ghostty hasn't had to put out a critical update since before 1.0 launched.

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