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Comment by zenlot | Hacker News Reader

I use ghostty daily now. Switched recently. In macOS I can re-map now caps lock to be cmd and it works for cmd+c. Everything else is great, sensible defaults and what's not easily customizable.

Gruvbox light theme looks great too.

The fact it's written in Zig is awesome too, if you ever question if Zig is ready, ghostty is your answer to that.

Not seeing myself going back. It's great experience.

Tip: if you combine your ghostty flow with aerospace, it's nearly perfect setup for your keyboard only experience on mac.

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Can you tell my why I should consider ghostty? (as a daily Terminal.app user)

It's fast. Like, faster than your brain expects it to be.

I live in vim and after about 30 seconds of checking ghostty out I switched from iTerm2 to ghostty for good. No regerts.

I use terminology today, which is also "fast." The major issue I run into with ghostty vs terminology is that ssh in ghostty is broken due to the terminfo thing. I don't fully understand why ghostty can't pretend to be a different terminal that remotes know about (for now), but I assume there's some reason.

Have you tried the suggestions in https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh? I don't know what issue you may be experiencing but this solved my issue with using htop in an ssh session.

For another approach, personally I found just doing `TERM=xterm-256color ssh <server>` more practical than the solutions at https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh

That is essentially the 2nd solution recommended. I think ghostty could do this itself as a hack. If the target binary is ssh (heuristic, but, ok), inject TERM=xterm-256color into env of the child process at launch.

I guess it isn't a huge deal to have every user to modify their ssh_config instead, but it's an ergonomic pain point for many new users.

Copying terminfo around is more inconvenient than I want to put up with for now. Overriding TERM is fine, I guess.

Mostly terminology is just a fairly good terminal, so I have little incentive to switch. :)

Fast. Very fast. Good configuration and theming options too. Literally no lag, even with thousands of lines scrollback. It doesn't get in your way on your day to day terminal activities. Feels natural.

Everyone telling you that it's fast because iTerm2 is slow. Terminal.app is already faster than iTerm2 and on par o very close to most other alternatives in terms of speed.

I also used Terminal until recently and don't use any of the advanced features alternatives provide. The main reason to switch from Terminal.app is truecolor support. The terminfo thing is annoying but I just setenv TERM in ssh config. Better split panes is nice. Configuration in a text file is a matter of taste, but documentation is good.

macOS Tahoe adds true color support to Terminal.app https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/16/apples-terminal-app-mac...

Other huge projects are Clickhouse and Bun.

ClickHouse is written in C++ (un)fortunately. Although I do think that Zig would fit it quite well too

Yeah ClickHouse is written in C++, though rust is also possible https://clickhouse.com/blog/rust - would be cool to see zig!

I think you’re thinking of TigerBeetle, not Clickhouse, which is a quite performant db with a fascinating simulation-tested story and proof of performance / safety.

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