Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

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I have discovered Ghostty only this year, and I have switched to it a few months ago.

For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators. I have used for long time intervals at least 8 or 9 video terminal emulators, from the original xterm until the one used immediately before ghostty, which was kitty (and including Konsole, the Gnome terminal, the XFCE terminal, WezTerm and others).

I consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Nor have I encountered any feature that I really miss (though a few things that worked in other emulators, do not work, at least not with the default configuration, e.g. setting the title of a tab window with the standard escape sequence of characters; but the ghostty titles are fine, i.e. the pwd value while in shell and the invoked command otherwise).

I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows. I have used it only in Linux, so I do not know anything about bugs under macOS.

>I consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Is there a way to encounter an unnoticeable bug?

>I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows.

Boyoboyoboy. It seems that you have never heard of the concept of combinatorial explosion, which in software testing, means that due to the zillions of different execution paths, plenty of bugs, which are undetected, can still exist, and can very easily not be found by just one lone ranger using some software package, no matter how long they use it, at least within a few years.

>For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators.

Were you using that great number of emulators serially, or parallely, in those decades?

If parallely, you must have spend less time on each, than "for decades" implies.

If serially, you must have spent a great number of decades to use a great number of emulators.

This seems like a hastily put together comment.

I use the terminal that happens to be at hand, which is usually the one that ships with the OS, or the one in VSCode. I don't have high demands on the terminal, and I don't understand what problems are there to solve, as long as it handles unicode and control sequences correctly.

> I don't understand what problems are there to solve, as long as it handles unicode and control sequences correctly.

It turns out its not 1986 anymore, and sometimes we want to output gasp images to our terminals

We could already do that in 1986, outside UNIX.

Huh. I never knew that was a thing. Although sounds cool. Though if you do that, or take something like a ncurses UI, and start turning it into something nicer, at what point do you have something that's not a terminal?

But I guess there's promise in having something that's like a Jupyter notebook, but for files.

Yeah, I mean, a well-designed GUI is hard to beat, but for one-off tools/scripts, being able to dump images to the terminal is often really nice

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