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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

I use Ghost TTY coming from iTerm for no other reason than I saw everybody else using and praising it.

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.

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> 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.

For me,

* 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

input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).

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.

> input latency.

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 personally like how I barely had to configure it, how nerd fonts just worked, and how nicely it renders text

It’s not quite finished, give it time to mature. But pretty good already.

Yeah, it's a good polished piece of software no doubt. I'm not denying that, but the hype it gets is just... I don't know.

Agreed, though it hasn’t been excessive in my experience. Just that the devs are better at marketing than others. Really shows how important that side of the equation is. Wish I was better at it myself.

> Just that the devs are better at marketing than others.

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.

[0] https://terminal.click

Splits can have different font sizes

This doesn't seem like a particularly compelling feature to me, but iTerm can do this too (since the person you replied to mentioned iTerm, this seems relevant).

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