Hacker News Reader

Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

Why are you not using Ghostty instead of iTerm2?

Not OP, but iTerm is the one I knew and it does it's job. No need to move away from something that works.

Why should an iTerm user switch to ghostty? What do they gain by moving away from a highly mature, feature rich, native offering?

iTerm is slow as fuck. cat large files in iTerm vs Ghostty and you will see the difference. Ghostty always stays responsive, and has much lower memory usage. The typing latency on Ghostty is so low it really enriches the terminal experience. People still using stuff like iTerm2 are likely just either not using their terminal very often or are ignorant to the wider terminal emulator market.

Yeah I guess the only reason I stick with iTerm over some new thing is because I'm either not in the terminal all the time (I just killed an emacs process and my shell reported it was running for 191 hours, 43 min) or because I'm just a big dumb dumb for not using the same program you do, or too dumb to be aware of the "wider terminal emulator market" lmao. Ok man.

Also why would I cat a huge file? That's what less is for. Like wow, in some pretend worse case scenario where you cat out some huge binary file, Ghostty is what, how many ms quicker to paint? Wow! It saved 40MB of memory doing that too, my computer has 16GB I don't care. None of these reasons are very compelling to give up a mature terminal deeply embedded into my workflows, with great tmux integration, and a searchable scrollback buffer.

No ability to search the scroll back buffer. Stuck on the latest 1.2 release, there shall be no more, even though important bug fixes like memory leaks when using Claude are not backported. That’s a wild “go F yourself” decision. Ghostty crashed the other day for me, I have zero expectations that crash will be fixed for me until the 1.3 release. And when that release happens, the cycle of ridiculousness will restart. All the windows are gone when it crashes. I’m not ready to run Ghostty nightlies, last thing I need is the increased chance of crashing or bugs.

About to switch to native Terminal.app since it now supports truecolor. Or back to iTerm2.

Give Kitty a try. It's my go to on both Mac and Linux, I really enjoy it

Not the person you replied to, but I immediately switched back to iTerm2 after finding that Ghostty broke SSH to nearly all my servers by having an odd custom terminfo thing or something. iTerm2 requires no extra configuration after install on my end, whereas I needed to change several things about Ghostty and the UX for changing settings is terrible.

sounds like user error, SSH is fine in Ghostty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com