I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.
Among the "GPU rendered terminal" options, afaik Ghostty is the only one that has proper search/context menus, tabs, and scroll bars. I'm sure it's easy to get by without, but compared to the overall value-add of these terminals (which exists indeed but isn't tremendous either) I find it quite a significant downgrade, so I appreciate that Ghostty has both.
* available on Linux and macOS
* settings easy to transfer, just a file
* comes with Jetbrains Mono Nerd font built-in, no need to install it separately
* supports ligatures
Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.
I guess, but I have a hard time caring about 1/22 of a second of additional latency when iTerm works so well overall.
> There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow.
Such as?
I will "quietly" self-plug Terminal Click [0] because Ghostty and TC have discussed their differences in the past (check out the Media page.)
I'm definitely not ready to do splashes of any kind, because what Ghostty lacks in novelty Terminal Click lacks in polish.
Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else.
I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
Then again I don't put different foods on my fork when eating - which seems relevant.
YMMV because this is just one data point (but the most important data point for me)
on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.
Is that meant as an argument in favor of "another $400k for Zig" or against it?
I like Ghostty, but investing $800k to develop a programming language that is primarily known for producing a terminal emulator doesn't sound like a particularly strong argument in its favor.
Genuine question. I’m not trolling.
If there is a greater message, most people could probably put a similar amount of work on a project for the community.
Not many can write a lege cheque for a cause. Many who can, do so and consider their job done.
It's a credit for someone to be able to do one but choose to do both.
Mitchell clearly benefits from Zig succeeding. Well, some of his products depend on it. From a cynical point of view, donating nearly a million dollars is also a way to gain soft power over the language's future direction...
I'm not suggesting that's his motivation though... I'm just asking whether someone who funds such a large share of a language's development inevitably ends up influencing its direction, even if he don't formally control the project.