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Comment by corsica | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the hype around this application. The only UI Ghostty has is tabs and the context menu, is it really worth the integration pain and now this rewrite?

Maybe they're planning for more, like those GUI configuration dialogs that iterm2 has?

Kitty uses OpenGL for everything and draws its own tabs, they're fully customizable and can be made to look however you want. By not wasting time on integrating with massive frameworks for drawing tabs, Kovid was able to quickly implement really useful things that Ghostty is sorely missing, like wrapping the output of the last command in a pager (run 'ps -auxf' and press Ctrl+Shift+G — this thing so useful it's hard to go without it now. It also works for remote shells across SSH sessions.)

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> The only UI Ghostty has is tabs and the context menu

- Tabs

- Splits

- "this process has exited" banner

- Close confirmation dialogs

- Change title dialog

- Unsafe paste detection dialogs

- Context menus

- Animated bells (opt in)

- "Quake-style" dropdown terminals (cross platform but different mechanisms)

- Progress bars (ConEmu OSC 9;4)

- macOS: Apple Shortcuts Integration

- macOS: Spotlight Integration

Probably more I'm not thinking of. It's unfair to say it's just tabs. Could we have done this without a GUI toolkit? Of course! But the whole mission statement of this project was always to use platform-native (for various definitions) toolkits so that it _feels_ native.

That's not for everyone, and that's the great thing about the wonderful vibrant terminal ecosystem we have.

> is it really worth the integration pain and now this rewrite?

There's definitely a lot more on the way.

The first goal and primary focus of the project was to build a stable, feature rich (terminal sequences) terminal emulator. We're basically there. Next up, we're expanding GUI functionality significantly, including having more escape sequences result in more native GUI elements. But also traditional things like preferences GUIs, yes.

We're also integrating a lot more deeply with native features provided by each platform (somewhat related to the GUI toolkit choice), such as automatic iCloud syncing of your configuration on macOS. Now that the terminal is stable, we can start to really lean in to application features.

This isn't for everyone. Some people like Kitty's textual tabs. That's fine! It's a tradeoff. That's the beauty of choice. :) Kitty is a great terminal, if you prefer it, please use it. But it has completely different tradeoffs than Ghostty.

I know I'm about to show my ignorance regarding GUI programming here, but: would SDL2 be a suitable choice? Or would that be too low-level? Or just...the wrong sort of library?

SDL2 wouldn't be appropriate for what they're trying to do.

SDL2 is more of a drawing and graphics library. You tell it to put a triangle here, it puts a triangle there. But it has no idea what a button should look like - how it should behave, how it should be animated - on Mac, on Windows, on KDE, on Gnome, etc. You could try to painstakingly recreate this look and feel for each platform, but it's a lot of effort, you probably won't get it quite right, you'll make oversights on accessibility and internationalisation, and your hard work will instantly look dated once the platform evolves.

To make native GUIs, you need to talk to the libraries that draw platform-native components, like buttons, for you. But of course each platform works totally differently, and the whole affair is honestly kind of a mess, which is why truly native cross-platform applications tend to be fairly rare in practice. Maintaining five different GUI code bases for all sorts of fringe platforms is not, in most cases, a good use of time. For most apps, either you stick to native and cut less significant platforms, or you abandon native altogether and just use a cross-platform wrapper like Electron.

Just from my basic understanding after working with sdl2 and gtk, sdl2 is more suitable for game development, It doesn't have standard set of UI elements. So every UI element, and interactions will have to be implemented by hand. Now imagine displaying a list view with huge number of items.

And the worst is, Terminals works with texts, sdl2, in my knowledge do not have proper way to display large amount of text, let alone select and copy.

There are probably other issues, these came from what I experienced

Unless you plan on writing your entire UI from scratch, like, from the framebuffer on up (in which case it will integrate poorly with the rest of the desktop) you must use one of the common widget toolkits: GTK or Qt. If you want the flexibility of not having to commit to C++, GTK is your only choice.

> including having more escape sequences result in more native GUI elements.

That’s how you invent HTML forms (those were modeled on IBM 3270)

saved sessions in a tree style with folders would be a nice advanced feature!

> Kovid was able to quickly implement

Is this new account actually Kovid?

Context: “aumerle” had posted only about Kitty for years as though impartial. And talked about Kovid as if they were a different person. Turns out “aumerle” is Kovid and got banned. He was trash-talking ghostty and advertising Kitty in every ghostty thread. (He does the same using “aumerlex” on reddit, but nobody has called him out on there yet.)

I’m suspicious here because Kovid spent hours trying to force me to admit that he writes code faster than Mitchell XD https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42567224 (you’ll need “showdead” enabled, all of Kovid’s comments got flagged to death).

In addition to what others have said (positively), ‘libghostty’ is also a game changer.

It’s like the “WebKit” for terminal, as I understand it.

Anyone could drop-in libghostty, and immediately have a fully functional terminal.

I went on a big meandering hunt for a terminal application that did what I wanted. I have tried many and while nothing perfectly met my needs, Ghostty is the one I am using now.

That counts for something.

Perhaps it is just it lacks an obvious reason to move away from it. Usually, the thing that made me try another terminal was because of something I couldn't do. It wasn't a matter of listing all the pros and cons and going with the best one. It has just found a home with me because it hasn't outstayed its welcome.

Well... a terminal is a GUI app, so they had to choose some GUI framework. On Linux GTK is as good a choice as any. (Yes I know you can skip the framework and talk to X11/Wayland directly, like xterm/foot do, but that's a pain all of its own.)

What about Qt? Would that have been a better experience? Or would you experience different issues?

Qt has no official C bindings. This makes it difficult for a new language to write Qt bindings, unlike for GTK.

My font doesn’t look as nice on Kitty as it does on Ghostty. The only place that looks better than ghostty is neovide, but they don’t support tabs yet, and because it is more resource intensive, it drains the battery faster.

Agreed, seems like a lot of unnecessary girating just to implement something that would've been much simpler + cross-platform with a custom UI toolkit and something like opengl. Tabs are like UI 101

Easier integration with the desktops accessibility and input stack? When using GTK, you would probably also get out the box better performance/power on Wayland since it can take care of partial surface updates etc for you.

Luckily the UI and the core (libghostty) are separate so you can girate out your own UI 101 version without GTK if you'd like.

And someone already did: https://github.com/gabydd/wraith (Wayland-only frontend, extremely lightweight). Super cool.

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