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Comment by Arrowmaster | Hacker News Reader

You didn't cover it but is Ghostty still entirely dependent on libadwaita for most of its UI features? I completely lost interest when it was still in beta and I found out many features were disabled on Linux if you didn't want it to look and behave as a Gnome app.

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Yes, its a hard dependency. But we go out of our way to add CSS classes to our UI widgets and even have a configuration in Ghostty to supply custom CSS directly (without you having to mess with gsettings or anything). We've seen some pretty incredible customizations in our showcase channel in Discord.

We haven't committed to our CSS classes yet as a stable API but we plan to do that in the next release cycle. Still, they haven't changed much in a year. :)

> CSS classes

GTK has gotten so fat that it's more like a 2nd-rate Electron. Not that Electron would have done Ghostty any good...

I have a bad feeling that the only decent & consistent UI option under Linux is to target Win32 API, then run it under Wine.

What does this have to do with Ghostty?

Are we looking at the same title?

We rewrote the Ghostty *G* *T* *K* application

The article about struggling... with GTK.

You didn't explain anything wrong with GTK. You just brought up Electron out of nowhere.

Electron is bringing an entire web browser in to provide a cross-platform user interface. GTK has become almost a web browser to provide a cross-platform user interface. That is why I started off with

> CSS classes

To spell it out, I think it is all excessive.

I don't think you know enough about GTK if you think having a CSS parser is bloat in a UI toolkit versus a whole theming engine.

Their CSS implementation is broader than what most actual browsers had 10 years ago. I would not have commented if I weren't already painfully familiar.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/css-overview.html

It even has a DOM inspector window:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/597259/how-do-i-open-gtk-ins...

The negative aspects of Electron have little to nothing to do with CSS, and you're only invoking it here to poison the well by association.

You are projecting. Personally speaking, I would choose Electron waaaay before I'd choose GTK. That probably wasn't an option for his optimized terminal, but would be Good Enough™ for just about anything else.

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