31 ms·

Ghostty 1.0

2319 points by matrixhelix 2y ago

asdf147 2y ago
General question, how safe is it to use non-stock os terminals? In the end often they need to receiver super user at some point.
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  I would say it's about as safe as using any other program. On Linux, by default you will not get any isolation within the same user context. So if your account has access to sudo (regardless whether with password or not), assume that any program you've ever run on that account also has sudo access. There are sandboxes and selinux but neither is used consistently enough on consumer systems.
artooro 2y ago
This happens to be exactly what I was looking for in a Terminal app. Native UI, fast, and native screen splitting, doesn't try to do too much. Five stars
ahmadabouadla 2y ago
Beautiful
clayrisser 2y ago
Just packaged Ghostty for Debian. https://github.com/clayrisser/debian-ghostty https://github.com/clayrisser/debian-ghostty
FlipFloopDev 2y ago
No cmd+f / ctrl+f ?? I'm sorry what?
7edrubep 2y ago
how to set tabs to vertical view like in iterm2 ? i googled a lot, but didn't find any
7edrubep 2y ago
how to set tabs to vertical left view like in iterm2? also how to set color\name to the particular tab?
mrjbq7 2y ago
This is a neat blog post explaining part of the magic: https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/ https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
VeejayRampay 2y ago
thanks Mitchell for all the hard work, it's nice to see quality and competition in this field
leetrout 2y ago
I'm very excited to have this because it's the first bit of high quality open source software to hit the streets in a while. I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future. Thank you, Mitchell! [0] https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- progbits 2y ago
  > I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future. That's a weird statement. I've been running a free, open-source and subscription-less browser (firefox) and terminal emulator (many) for close to 20 years. Actually I like what ladybird is doing in the browser space, given firefox is quite dependent on google cash. But this is just yet another terminal emulator in a sea of them. The only two distinguishing features I can see are hype and native UI (which mac users care about for some reason -- my native UI is a borderless rectangle in tiling WM).
  - SG- 2y ago
    native UI is so much more than how a border of a window looks like.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      What is native UI in this context? My terminal emulator is also always basically a full-screen black textarea with white letters. No window borders, no tabs, no buttons, no menus, nothing else. Is there anything native UI would give me in this case (and what is a native UI, I can't find it defined anywhere)?
      - nateb2022 2y ago
        > The big picture of "native" is that Ghostty is designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment. > On macOS, the GUI is written in Swift and uses AppKit and SwiftUI. (https://ghostty.org/docs/about#native https://ghostty.org/docs/about#native)
feznyng 2y ago
The author has a dev log I’d recommend if you’re curious about what makes it different + general goodies on Zig/terminal emulators. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
stmonty 2y ago
Awesome, I have been waiting for this since you originally announced it. I also enjoyed the blog posts.
icapybara 2y ago
Congratulations
kristopolous 2y ago
I assume this is mostly a mac thing? The effort to get this up and running on debian appears to be a bit more work than normal.
- SG- 2y ago
  it's a Mac and Linux thing.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mrjbq7 2y ago
  $ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git $ cd ghostty $ zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast $ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty
  - beanjuiceII 2y ago
    tried this doesn't work do i need some specific zig version?
    - eddythompson80 2y ago
      0.13.0 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37424c7210d1230242c709e990/build.zig#L30 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37... The full script is pretty much: $ wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.... $ tar xvf zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz $ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git $ cd ghostty $ ../zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast $ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty
      - tlhunter 2y ago
        Looks like there are a few deps needed: sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev git Otherwise you'll get this error: error: unable to spawn glib-compile-resources: FileNotFound Build Summary: 78/83 steps succeeded; 2 failed (disable with --summary none) install transitive failure └─ install ghostty transitive failure └─ zig build-exe ghostty ReleaseFast native transitive failure ├─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.c) failure └─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.h) failure error: the following build command failed with exit code 1: /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache/o/57acb02f2b1ccf1b03b9597a8c5f2d09/build /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache /home/tlhunter/.cache/zig --seed 0xb4306e7d -Z11426c6f3a70c8b9 -Doptimize=ReleaseFast ``` I'm quite surprised they don't provide a .deb package as that checks off 90% of Linux users.
do_not_redeem 2y ago
I just want to say thanks for the minimum-contrast option: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#minimum-contrast https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#minimum-contrast I've grown so sick of tools/TUIs that output unreadable text (like Debian's ls that defaults to dark-blue-on-black for directories). I look forward to never manually theming a terminal app again!
- thenipper 2y ago
  This is great. I’m middle aged and I’ve definitely noticed my eyesight needs more and more help in the contrast dept
- rand0m4r 2y ago
  thanks for sharing
- commandersaki 2y ago
  Another goodie is selection-foreground and selection-background config to set the colour for highlight selection, makes a massive difference when it's something you can choose rather than the translucent crap on mac, or the defaults on Windows/Linux.
sitkack 2y ago
Is there a bounty for zero days?
- sitkack 2y ago
  https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/GHSA-5hcq-3j4q-4v6p https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...
- selectnull 2y ago
  Yes, your name will forever be on that pull request.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    [flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
BSDobelix 2y ago
So I will see how well it works on FreeBSD, but I love the development model, keeping it "closed" for the 1.0 (focus and polish), I have not tested it yet, but it already "feels" like professional engineering work.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  source is open https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
  - afatparakeet 2y ago
    Only as of 1.0 release I believe was their point.
Jarred 2y ago
I've been using Ghostty for several months now (used Alacritty before that). Ghostty is really, really good. It's fast, it gets the text rendering right (many cross-platform terminals struggle with this), and it has all the features I need. It's also some very well-written Zig code. We use some of the code for graphemes in Bun for `Bun.stringWidth`.
- SnowingXIV 2y ago
  Likewise coming from alacritty myself. This out of the box gives me everything I really want and does it well. Not to mention the development process was quite refreshing to see. Decision making process for sane defaults and to allow customization quite easily. Nicely done.
modernerd 2y ago
Ghostty has a hard-to-find "quake mode" that may interest some. During the beta I had it configured like this on macOS: keybind = global:cmd+space=toggle_quick_terminal quick-terminal-animation-duration = 0.1 There isn't an option to set the default height of the "quick terminal" window that I'm aware of but you can drag the bottom of the window after it opens and it will persist between toggles.
- alejoar 2y ago
  This is the first thing I went looking for when looking at the docs, thank you.
  - swyx 2y ago
    what does quake mode do?
    - vorpalhex 2y ago
      Scroll down from top on any screen
    - diggan 2y ago
      Comes from video games where you usually can hit ~ (tilde) or other character to make a in-game console appear, usually sliding down from above or at least in the top half/third/quarter of the screen. Popularized by Quake and games from that heritage (like Source engine) I suppose. Desktop equivalent is that you have a terminal available at a short-cut/button-press that will always show it but not fully hide the rest, no matter what other context you're in. Pretty handy.
      - swyx 2y ago
        TIL. thank you for taking the time to answer - wasnt obvious from above whether or not this was some kind of joke easter egg thing
        2y ago
fishgoesblub 2y ago
I initially scoffed when I read "platform-native UI" as I've found programs made in Electron typically proclaim something similar when they are anything but native, so when I saw it used GTK for Linux (SwiftUI for MacOS) my interests were piqued. Always fun to mess around with new terminal emulators. edit: alas, it doesn't support bitmap fonts..
- BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
  Thanks for this post, first thing I did was search "bitmap" in the thread. If I can't use Terminus (+Unifont fallback), it's not for me.
  - TheSmoke 2y ago
    fyi, I have just tried Unifont and worked perfectly.
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    Curious as to how much it matters; if a TTF font looks similar and is fast?
    - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
      > if a TTF font looks similar It doesn't, especially on average DPI monitors. Oh, you mean the OTF trick.
  - fishgoesblub 2y ago
    It was the first thing I check whenever I try a new terminal. If Terminus doesn't work then the terminal doesn't work for me.
- opan 2y ago
  >it doesn't support bitmap fonts Very disappointing. Not sure why people are trying to kill off bitmap support in everything these days. Will stick with foot.
videlov 2y ago
I have found the following community site for generating Ghostty config quite helpful https://ghostty.zerebos.com/ https://ghostty.zerebos.com/
- elAhmo 2y ago
  This is great, thanks! It would be amazing if CMD + , would open this directly.
  - shpx 2y ago
    I uninstalled the app when I saw that Cmd+, opens an empty text file called config. I'm not going to learn more configuration languages or type 30 characters (or paste them from the browser) to toggle a binary setting.
    - computerfriend 2y ago
      Aren't plaintext configuration files standard? It's how I configure most applications (and how I like it, because it makes the configuration shareable). As a DSL, it's key-value pairs. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
      - rplnt 2y ago
        It's a desktop/GUI application. It's definitely not a standard for those, no. I share the OPs frustation that I don't even know what I can configure and have to search web to be able to change something. And while the documentation is nice, it's not exactly great for this. Also, having an explorable and searchable UI doesn't mean it's not saved in the same shareable and readable file.
      - agos 2y ago
        no, especially for an app that boasts to be "native"
      - wpm 2y ago
        The ultimate end format for the config stored on disc is completely irrelevant to how the config is created. Simple doesn’t mean easy to experiment with, simple to understand, fast to write and so on. No one is confused as to how the ghostty config works. Key value pairs. Sure. A window full of GUI controls and system color pickers can create that config file, or I can manually by hand. I’d prefer the former.
loeg 2y ago
> For example, on macOS, Ghostty supports Quick Look, force touch, the macOS secure input API, built-in window state recovery on restart, etc. These are all native APIs provided by macOS that don't have equivalents in Linux desktop environments. I believe window state recovery has some approximate equivalent in GNOME and KDE, but maybe not exactly the same (and I don't know how easy it is to integrate with).
- eliaspro 2y ago
  On X11, Gnome and KDE Plasma supported session/state restore, but this was based on XSMP and couldn't be simply reused for Wayland. There's an ongoing standardization effort to provide equivalent functionality for Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... KDE Plasma provides a "fake session restore" for the time being: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/3523 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...
  - loeg 2y ago
    Ah, good to know.
ksec 2y ago
This feels like the Vagrant moment [1] again. Cant believe 15 years have passed already. Together with Bun I believe that is two high profile open source software made with Zig. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
- BrouteMinou 2y ago
  Wayland WM "River" is great too.
- ajoseps 2y ago
  and it’s the same guy
- ivve 2y ago
  What do you mean the "vagrant moment"?
alberth 2y ago
For those who don’t have the background: - created by Mitchell (founder of HashiCorp) - it’s developed in Zig (and Mitchell recently pledge $300k to Zig foundation) - uses native UI (which is super rare for cross platform app) - amazingly performant. e.g. https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362 - has lots of amazing small details like below https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113443002518588524 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113443002518588524 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113166930440000852 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113166930440000852 This has been a passion project of his for the past 2-years and he’s completely MIT open sourced it. He’s spent a lot of time thinking and ensuring this project can persist in the future even without him. Many people have tremendous respect for Mitchell’s technical abilities, as well as hugely respect how he operates (genuinely nice person and thinks about things long-term and does the hard work for sustainability). Lots more to read at: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- saberience 2y ago
  It doesn't work in Windows so how is it cross platform? Also, I've been using terminals since DOS in 1990 and never once have I had to say, "I wish this terminal had more performance", so I'm not sure that performance is really relevant here. If I write a command to build my project which takes 10 mins to build, does it matter whether the terminal command ran in 10 milliseconds vs 1 millisecond? In the linked speed demo one command was 8 milliseconds faster than another. Ok? Is a terminal written in Zig better than one made in C++ or Rust? Again, unsure why its relavant at all.
  - marcus0x62 2y ago
    > It doesn't work in Windows so how is it cross platform? Linux and macOS are different platforms. Would calling it multi-platform make you happier? > Also, I've been using terminals since DOS in 1990 and never once have I had to say, "I wish this terminal had more performance", I remember the Windows terminal being unbearably slow in the past and wishing it had better performance. Maybe this just isn’t for you.
sureglymop 2y ago
Does it support Ctrl+Scroll to zoom? Somehow I got used to this years ago and unfortunately not a lot of software supports it. Have been using Wezterm until now, which does.
- sionisrecur 2y ago
  That's usually a feature of the Desktop Environment. If you configure it there then it works everywhere.
baq 2y ago
[flagged]
- eikenberry 2y ago
  Windows support is planned.
- qup 2y ago
  How many platforms are required? I noticed it doesn't have an OS/2 download.
  - metadaemon 2y ago
    missing z/OS as well...
  - azinman2 2y ago
    I think it’s both fair to say Linux and Mac make something cross platform, but it’s also very reasonable to expect Windows as well given its massive install base size.
  - timeon 2y ago
    How is that relevant here? You should have named Android [0] because that is only platform that has more users than Windows. [0] But that one is still Linux.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      But defining it by total users isn't very useful either - in this case, "total users who regularly use a terminal" would be a far more relevant factor. I think the only reasonable, useful, general definition of "cross-platform" is "runs on at least 2 of the 3 main desktop platforms".
- loeg 2y ago
  No, cross-platform just means more than one platform. It obviously is that: Mac and Linux.
thiht 2y ago
I’ve been very disappointed with Alacritty (no support for split term in favor of tmux) and WezTerm (insane config format, config has no business using a full fledged programming language) feature wise, so I have high hopes regarding Ghostty, can’t wait to try it!
- medimikka 2y ago
  Config being a programming language has insane advantages. Not only can I error check my config in vim or Visual Code, I can do insane things with logic that just don't work in other config file approaches. My laptop is connected to a 32" 4k monitor at work, standalone while traveling, and to a 27" 2k at home. WezTerm "knows" that, and sets things such as font size and line height automagically. Even more, I can have split logic based on window size, window titles that show me who also checked out a file while I am inside an editor, even per-window color and font schemes. All apps should use something like Lua for their config.
  - thiht 2y ago
    It's great that you (and many others) find it useful, but I genuinely have no idea what this is about. I switch my iTerm from my 13" MBP, 32" monitor, and iPad all the time, and I don't need any config to make it work. Maybe I just don't care enough about this stuff but I don't see what I would even configure this way. Anyway, this is the reason I love the new wave of terminals, they bring new stuff on the table and anyone can find one they love. I just installed Ghostty and it works as I expect out of the box, with even less config (0) than I have on iTerm. And it's fast. Now I just hope they'll add a config UI some day (one of the reasons I prefer static config files: you can't really get a UI with a programming language) and I'll be in terminal heaven
    - eviks 2y ago
      If you don't care about this stuff you'll just as easily configure in a static key=value table whatever you like, lua doesn't limit you here. It's benefits are all optional
  - 2y ago
mikkelam 2y ago
I have honestly been so excited to try this after listening to several videos of mitchell talking about his work. What a christmas present! A terminal is so dear to us software engineers, and this seems like such a love declaration to the terminal. Time to spend hours tuning my config!
jedisct1 2y ago
This is by far the best terminal emulator I've ever used.
mitchellh 2y ago
<3 This has been a work of passion for the past two years of my life (off and on). I hope anyone who uses this can feel the love and care I put into this, and subsequently the amazing private beta community (all ~5,000 strong!) that helped improve and polish this into a better release than I ever could alone. Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that there is a good group of EXCELLENT terminals out there, and I'm not claiming Ghostty is strictly better than any of them. Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices. Shout out to Kitty, WezTerm, Foot in particular. iTerm2 gets some hate for being relatively slow but nothing comes close to touching it in terms of feature count. Rio is a super cool newer terminal, too. The world of terminals is great. I’ve posted a personal reflection here, which has a bit more history on why I started this, what’s next, and some of the takeaways from the past two years. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
- jdmg94 2y ago
  how did you decided on building for arch and NixOS but not for red hat or debian?
- the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
  Thanks so much for this. I really enjoy using it and I also refer to the source code quite a bit as I'm trying to get more familiar with Zig :)
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  Looks really awesome. I'm going to sound like I don't belong in the hipster terminal club, but the reason I shied away from some of the other terminals is the lack of tabs, which looks like yours has when I did a quick Google question/search. (if wezterm and the like have them, I must have missed it or it wasn't obviously apparent in the settings how to achieve them). I know everyone will say but tmux and/or native multiplexing bla, but I'm kind of old school and only do screen remotely if needed, and I just like a lot of terminal tabs in my workflow with a quick mod left/right arrow to navigate between (and if native multiplexing in Ghostty is simple and easy I'd probably do some of that too). Perhaps this is why I've never left iterm2.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments) Ghostty Devlog 004 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709113 - Sept 2023 (2 comments) Talk: Ghostty and Some Useful Zig Patterns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491031 - Sept 2023 (2 comments) Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty Devlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736686 - July 2023 (1 comment)
luckydata 2y ago
Could someone give me an idea why I would want to use this instead of any other terminal?
- jeremy_k 2y ago
  Same request. As someone who uses the standard Teriminal application on my MBP I'm wondering what benefits I might find from Ghostty
  - spopejoy 2y ago
    I think "vanilla" terminal users such as myself (e.g. I don't do a bunch of screen/tmuxing, I don't code in terminals etc) probably are not the target audience. I've had zero issues with standard macos terminal ( once I realized how to speed up key repeat in system settings that is), so I assume I don't need this.
    - jeremy_k 2y ago
      Makes a lot of sense, I fall into the same bucket as you so thank you for the response. I use the terminal to start up services and issue git commands. Beyond that, not too much.
    - luismedel 2y ago
      Same club here. I feel comfortable even with the crappiest terminal out there, as far as it allows me to write commands and read/copy output. Even the terminal in the Inferno OS felt good enough for me, like 20 years ago.
- orliesaurus 2y ago
  simplicity, feels zen-mode vs a lot of over-the-top-terminals these days also (from the docs): > Ghostty supports the Kitty graphics protocol, light/dark mode notifications, hyperlinks, and more. This lets terminal applications like Neovim, Zellij, and others do more than they could in other terminal emulators. Application features are higher-level features that are useful for interacting with the terminal emulator itself. For example, Ghostty supports native tabs, splits, a drop-down terminal on macOS, theme switching on system dark/light mode, etc.
frou_dh 2y ago
I wonder how the colour rendering is. Usually when I configure some editor in a terminal to use specific #rrggbb 24bit colours I like, the end result does not render the same as in non-terminal software (confirmed in the past with an eye-dropper tool).
999900000999 2y ago
Has anyone put up an Arch Aur yet ?
- SG- 2y ago
  https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    Thanks! This is why I love HN. I had already installed from source, but this makes updating easier after all.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gpanders 2y ago
    Note the AUR package was removed because it's since been packaged in the official Arch repos. There is a ghostty-git AUR repo for tracking the main branch: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty-git
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      Will Arch auto migrate the Aur package for me, or should I uninstall and install from the repo.
- dsp_person 2y ago
  AUR not even needed https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    How... did that get in there so fast? I just updated a couple of hours ago and it wasn't there. Now it is.
antirez 2y ago
After a quick test this looks incredibly good and fast. I'll use it as a terminal for the next weeks to see how it goes, but I have good feelings. Thank you so much for writing it. EDIT: WOOOW, for me this is going to be a game changer. I was just working at Redis stuff outputting a ton of debugging info and results, and normally the terminal was the bottleneck, and here instead it printed half million of results in the blink of an eye. And then I could go back in the history without any performance degradation. I love this: for development of systems it makes a big difference.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tessierashpool9 2y ago
  why don't you just pipe it into a file and then less it? if your redis stuff prints so much stuff you might want to reevaluate the respective program logic.
  - btheunissen 2y ago
    Telling to creator of Redis that they might want to reevaluate their respective program logic (Redis) is pretty funny, only on HN :)
    - antirez 2y ago
      Haha, the question makes sense per se but there are definitely times where you want to see the output in real time. I'm a big fan of printf-debugging :D
      - noisy_boy 2y ago
        It feels good to hear support for printf-debugging coming from such esteemed corner. I have been doing that for a significant majority of my career instead of dropping into debugger. The side effect is you become pretty good at crafting meaningful logs.
    - deleted 2y ago
bun_terminator 2y ago
The little it says about what this even is seems to be wrong. This is not cross-platform at all
- mitchellh 2y ago
  It works on both macOS and Linux.
- SG- 2y ago
  Windows is a third class citizen when it comes to the development world.
  - metaltyphoon 2y ago
    Lmao this statement is so funny.
  - justmarc 2y ago
    It's its own doing
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
nhumrich 2y ago
In case anyone is wondering, this terminal appears to work just great on windows by using WSLg. I installed on linux inside WSL, then launched it, and it looks/works great. Clipboard also works.
- attentive 2y ago
  Did you have to build it? On which OS?
  - nhumrich 2y ago
    I used Arch. It was already in the AUR, but I believe it did build from source
- eapotapov 2y ago
  Thanks! I did it, but I'm having problems with window resizing and mouse selection. When I try to resize the window, the actual window is smaller than it appears. Did you encounter the same issue? Related issues: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/633 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/633
  - eapotapov 2y ago
    oh, it's actually a problem with ultra-wide screens and there is no simple resolution for this and I gave up https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/590 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/590
st3fan 2y ago
Looks great. Eagerly waiting to be able to "Use Left Option as Esc+" like iTerm has. Without it, it is nearly impossible to use Emacs.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  Was just looking for how to configure this globally. You can create a keybind for every key[0][1] but that's a bit silly faff nonsense in current year 2024. [0] e.g. `keybind = alt+f=esc:f` [1] Which affects both option keys, sadly.
  - lilyball 2y ago
    See `macos-option-as-alt`
    - zimpenfish 2y ago
      Ah, damn it, I searched for "meta" and completely missed that. Apologies to Ghostty!
- lilyball 2y ago
  Look for `macos-option-as-alt`. The Ghostty docs use the term "Alt" here to mean using the key as a terminal input modifier rather than for macOS text input. This setting allows you to specify only one option key to use this behavior for.
- samatman 2y ago
  I have this as a system-wide mapping with Karabiner. Complex modifications, "Post esc if left_alt is pressed alone". There's never a time when I wouldn't want this to work, may as well enable it everywhere. Edit: It looks like I misunderstood what that setting in iTerm does. But hey if you do want left option to send Esc by itself, that's how to get it.
sigmonsays 2y ago
any nix users aware of a derivation?
- vluft 2y ago
  there's a flake in the official repo that works fine for me (nixos unstable)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
rewgs 2y ago
Overall nice, but I'm bummed to be running into some bugs regarding a few key binding assignments. Though, I could just be missing something due to the somewhat spartan docs. Given all the time and hype, I'd have hoped that wrinkles like this would've been ironed out by launch time. Back to Wezterm for now, but I'll certainly be checking back in at some point.
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jhatemyjob 2y ago
Upon installing this, I went straight for this part of the documentation: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-fullscreen https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-f... Unfortunately the "tabs not working in non-native fullscreen" thing is a dealbreaker for me, so I will be switching back to iTerm 2. But Ghostty as a whole looks promising. I like zig, zig-objc, MIT license, libghostty, config via text file. I will check back every month or so because I really want to use this. But my hate for macOS native fullscreen outweighs everything else. Edit: Ok here we go, this is why it's not implemented: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomment-1802547697 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomme... There's more than one workaround which is superior in my opinion: https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png IIRC you can even use AppKit to remove the close/minimize/fullscreen buttons, so it would just be a blank bar. You could go a step further and use private APIs / objc runtime voodoo to set the height of the titlebar to 0. That might outside your design philosophy though. Also, FYI, clicking the green fullscreen button still uses macOS native fullscreen, so you definitely want to disable that button (which is a public AppKit API) when you have that option enabled
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block_dagger 2y ago
Nice work! How does this compare to Warp?
- do_not_redeem 2y ago
  - open source - faster - no AI bloat - no telemetry - no obnoxious warning banner if you run without admin access - no VCs that will enshittify the app in a few years - doesn't require an internet connection and an account to access motherfucking bash on your local machine
  - alecthomas 2y ago
    Preach!
c2xlZXB5Cg1 2y ago
Startup time was very bad until I disabled adwaita with gtk-adwaita = false
- YorickPeterse 2y ago
  This sounds like an issue with your environment. For example, on my Fedora 41 setup Ghostty starts up pretty much instantly regardless of the value of this option.
skerit 2y ago
This is very nice! How do I work around remote SSH shells complaining like `Error opening terminal: xterm-ghostty`?
- mikergray 2y ago
  https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh
- SG- 2y ago
  https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo
gregwebs 2y ago
Warp has been meeting all my needs other than tab switching behavior. It's not open source but the UX is great. Switched from WezTerm which was working cross platform but not quite as good. Both are low latency and written in Rust.
howon92 2y ago
To people who tried using it, what are the reasons to use it over iTerm2?
- jitl 2y ago
  It’s fast. In the same league as Alacritty and Wezterm, which is to say on the doom fire benchmark those terminals can do 500fps plus, where iTerm2 does 90fps on my M4 MacBook Pro. In practical terms if you use tmux or vim in the terminal, it makes a big difference for typing latency and scrolling.
  - howon92 2y ago
    Thank you! Interesting, because I haven't perceived "terminal performance" as a problem before. I will try it out
  - quantonganh 2y ago
    Where should I look first if I only get around 160 fps, while WezTerm gets 400+ fps?
  - dschuessler 2y ago
    The parent is probably referring to this benchmark: https://github.com/const-void/DOOM-fire-zig/ https://github.com/const-void/DOOM-fire-zig/
- Jcampuzano2 2y ago
  I tried it but I just can't jump since it doesn't have support the global hotkey to autofocus iterm that I'm so used to. I tried using their toggle_visibility keybind but it's a bit wonky since it doesn't return focus back to another window when you toggle away.
  - kaycey2022 2y ago
    I just use rcmd for that. But that iterm feature is nice.
- 2y ago
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Could GPT5 or Claude written this from scratch?
- throwaway0665 2y ago
  of course not
- loeg 2y ago
  In the same sense that a million monkeys on typewriters could theoretically produce Shakespeare.
micahkepe 2y ago
Been trying it out for a few hours and love it! One feature that I do miss from Kitty is the cursor trail when your cursor moves in a buffer. Excited to see what Ghostty does in the future and thank you for a great new terminal!
- petepete 2y ago
  Cursor trail? I've been using Kitty since just about the beginning and didn't know it did that! Edit. Oh I see it's a really recent addition. I'll definitely be taking that for a spin.
makapuf 2y ago
Just want to share what I just realised, but the author is no one else than the mitchell hashimoto from hashicorp, so not exactly a newbie ! Would it have killed you to let us poor 99% have a bit of fun releasing useful projects too? (And also reach a bit of your determination, skill and talent)? (no, really, kudos, well done and thanks)
MyKiwi 2y ago
any tips on how to install it if you have nix (without nixos)?
- Cyph0n 2y ago
  You can install it as a Flake using plain Nix. See: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary#nix-flake https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary#nix-flake
  - soraminazuki 2y ago
    nixGL is also likely required on non-NixOS Linux distros. https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL
puttycat 2y ago
What am I missing? Can someone please explain what reason there is to switch/build a new terminal when we can use e.g. iTerm ?
- x3ro 2y ago
  Proper text-based configuration made me switch from iTerm to WezTerm, and i’ll give this a try as well :)
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  Yeah or vscode integrated bash?
  - TranquilMarmot 2y ago
    This is what I use for everything and it works great. Coworkers look at me crazy when I tell them I never open a dedicated terminal.
- nathansherburn 2y ago
  I'm still using the built in MacOS terminal. What am I missing? I mostly do webdev - maybe terminal features are more important for other types of programming?
  - dcre 2y ago
    Built-in terminal doesn’t support truecolor. Many CLI programs rely on that to look good.
    - herpdyderp 2y ago
      What CLI programs? I have yet to run into any issues after using the built in terminal for its entire lifespan.
      - oefrha 2y ago
        You wouldn’t realize because 24-bit colors are silently dropped. You don’t get the full experience but you also won’t “run into any issues”, unless you start using something that relies on 24-bit color coding for core functionality, like my own log viewer.
nickorlow 2y ago
Any Alacritry users have opinions on this? I've been waiting for its release and am looking forward to trying it. Wonder what the big differences are? I mostly appreciate Alacritty's simplicity and use tmux to manage multiple windows/panes.
- wonger_ 2y ago
  In my experience, Alacritty had a few bugs / unimplemented features that broke certain TUIs. Ghostty seems to be the most complete / least broken terminal emulator.
- jitl 2y ago
  You should also check out Wezterm too and see which one you like more. I ported my tmux keybinds to Wezterm - including vim-tmux-navigator style ctrl+{h,j,k,l} for navigating between nvim splits and Wezterm splits, ctrl-a as tmux leader. Getting tmux out of the way between terminal and nvim noticably improved scroll feeling in nvim and just in shell scrollback too. I styled Wezterm's tabs to look just like my tmux tab bar too, there's no visual difference for me between a Wezterm window with Wezterm tabs, and a Wezterm window with tmux tabs. If you're more of a terminal native than a Mac native, I think you'd enjoy it. My wezterm config: https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/new/config/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/new/config/wezterm...
  - nickorlow 2y ago
    Does wezterm (or any other terminal emulator) have some way to attach to a session over ssh or over multiple ttys? It's the main thing stopping me from jumping ship.
    - jitl 2y ago
      Yes, Wezterm has this. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html I haven’t used it yet, and it requires you install Wezterm on the remote. Ideally Wezterm could push a mux server executable to the remote host if needed.
metaltyphoon 2y ago
Why is the CLI args so weird with the + sign?
slantedview 2y ago
Congrats on the release! I'm excited to try this out.
elashri 2y ago
I have been waiting to try this out for sometime now. I recently tried various terminal emulator tools and I settled on wave terminal. This is a list of these tools for reference. I would list tools that are on both MacOS and Linux which is comparable to this new emulator. But also because I did not try any on windows. - Alacritty (https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty) - waveterminal (https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm) - Hyber (https://github.com/zeit/hyper https://github.com/zeit/hyper) - Kitty (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty) - Rio (https://github.com/raphamorim/rio https://github.com/raphamorim/rio) - Tabby (https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby) - Wezterm(https://github.com/wez/wezterm https://github.com/wez/wezterm) - Contour (https://contour-terminal.org https://contour-terminal.org) - Extraterm (https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm) - Warp (https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/) I didn't like that Warp is VC product as I don't like essential tool like a terminal in my workflow to be dependent on proprietary VC product.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
xbeta 2y ago
Great stuff! Does it have a Session/Workspace concept? Maybe we can learn from how Alacritty does it integrating with tmux?
cornel007 2y ago
Congrats! I’m curious what the main reason is you ended up going with the MIT license over GPL. Is it because of potentially integrating Ghostty with VS Code like you mentioned during Zig showtime a year ago?
- needlesslygrim 2y ago
  I'm also interested in why the MIT license was chosen. I guess it's because of the plan to create 'libghostty'?
Zetaphor 2y ago
Sadly another terminal that doesn't seem to support "Quake style" dropdown (that I can find) Having my terminal session available on a hotkey has become a critical part of my workflow
- SG- 2y ago
  except it does? View -> Quick Terminal.
  - Zetaphor 2y ago
    I've built from source on Linux, I don't use MacOS.
    - Zetaphor 2y ago
      This just doesn't seem to work :( quick-terminal-position=top quick-terminal-screen=main quick-terminal-autohide=false keybind=f9=toggle_quick_terminal Edit: Joined the discord, turns out this feature is MacOS only :/
    - gpanders 2y ago
      It's a macOS-only feature, for now.
- tristan957 2y ago
  GTK does not support the Wayland protocol to implement a Quake style terminal.
- IceDane 2y ago
  I think this being part of the terminal is sort of weird. I've had this functionality in my window managers for years. First xmonad, now awesomewm. It's called scratch pads.
PMunch 2y ago
Cool to finally see a 1.0 release of Ghostty! Will definitely check it out. One very strange and niche question though, do you support font switching with SGR escape codes? After the Monaspace font family was released I made a PR to Vim to support highlighting by font switching, but I've yet to find a terminal emulator to my liking that supports it. I'm building an eink laptop and its monochrome display requires some neat tricks like this to get the most out of the device.
hysan 2y ago
I might give this a shot but using GTK4 makes me think this won’t live up to the “native” claim on Linux. It will likely feel out of place on non-GTK DEs with KDE being the big one. And yes, I did read the about page disclaimer about Linux but strongly disagree about calling GTK4 the closest thing. That’s a very GNOME-centric view (e.g., ignores the rest of the Linux ecosystem) and makes me worry that any issues on other DEs will be ignored/deprioritized. It’s possible that I’m wrong and that a sizable population of the closed beta Linux users we’re on KDE, but without knowing, I’m very hesitant and put back by the “native” claim (it feels disingenuous).
- happens 2y ago
  Does "native" exist on Linux, in your opinion? Feels to me like both QT and GTK (and maybe iced if cosmic comes to fruition?) could be considered native (or none of them can, depending on your point of view).
  - hysan 2y ago
    I’d answer this differently depending on when you ask. 10 years ago (random, but long enough number) I would have said an easy yes. Both GTK and QT would have been acceptable toolkits to use as the cross DE issues weren’t that many and bugs got fixed. Ask me a few years ago and I’d waver. It wasn’t clear how ecosystem friendly GTK4 would be, so I might have optimistically replied the same. But caveat it with a “maybe support both X11 and Wayland.” But ask me now and I’d say to earn the label *Linux native*, you would have to support a lot. GTK4 has proven to not play well with other DEs. The jump to Wayland has caused a fairly significant split in DEs (this year has greatly closed the gap with many showing great progress in supporting Wayland) which means some apps may not work on your DE of choice. And overall, I’d be hesitant to claim that any app is truly *Linux native* because installing an app no longer guarantees that it’ll just work and look and feel right. You’d need to have builds GTK4 & QT, and make sure that they work in both X11 and Wayland for the next few years. When I look for apps nowadays, I tend to append my DE and/or distribution to my search. I currently think it’s more truthful (on Linux) to say that an app is native to a DE instead of to Linux. Note: I don’t think GTK4 is bad. One of the best parts of the Linux ecosystem is that we have a lot of great DEs that have gradually differentiated themselves by UX. GTK4 not playing well with others is in part due to how different GNOME’s UX is. The toolkit is meant to serve one DE paradigm now and that’s led to higher quality on that DE. The drawback to that diversification is that there is no easy way to support all DEs. Your toolkit drives what you support (unless you go out of your way to fix things that GTK4 isn’t fixing - which is why I put that bit about seeing how KDE issues would be addressed). The word “Linux”, now more than ever before, describes an ecosystem (or kernel) rather than an operating system.
navigate8310 2y ago
Any love for Windows. I'm getting restless to ditch putty but unable to find any good emulator that has select and login style of management screen.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  > Windows support is planned after the 1.0 release. This really does aim to be the terminal for all.
- metaltyphoon 2y ago
  When on windows I have been happy with WezTerm
- baaym 2y ago
  Apparently it works great on WSL See this other user's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518033
  - 38 2y ago
    For the 10th time WSL is not windows, it's a Linux emulator.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  I ditched putty a long time ago. Conemu is better than putty these days (latest Windows 10 or Windows 11 if you’re unlucky enough). I don’t like the “feel” of the new Windows Terminal “app” but it is more “modern” and “capable” (running a newer conhost under the hood). But if you’re willing to use non-standard software then WezTerm, Alacritty, and Kitty (WSL with an XServer) are all good options.
- ckrailo 2y ago
  I've been happy enough with Microsoft Terminal instead of PuTTY (and I appreciate the open source github repo). If you're comfortable with editing JSON files, you can save the SSH connections as profiles so you can click to open a new tab to whatever SSH session (or WSL setup, or Powershell setup) you want. Example: https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-custom-ssh-profiles-in-windows-terminal/ https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-custom-ssh-pr...
emmelaich 2y ago
Already in homebrew if you want to use that! I'm very new to Ghostty and went looking for my favorite theme "Solarized Light"; it's listed as "iTerm2 Solarized Light" -- in contrast (heh) to "Solarized Dark"
- CraigJPerry 2y ago
  Thanks for this lead - i eventually figured out there's 7 options: $ ghostty +list-themes /solari <... lists 7 options ...> And then in the ghostty config i could: theme = dark:Builtin Solarized Dark,light:Builtin Solarized Light
RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
As someone who uses the default terminal app, I'm curious to learn about other people's use-cases where the choice of terminal app makes a difference and how.
- naikrovek 2y ago
  I am not sure how to answer this. Why choose a non-default anything? It feels like deeper down, you’re asking why anyone chooses anything. These terminal emulators all behave slightly differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are configurable. Some are programmable. Some feel “right”. Others can be made to feel “right”. Etc. Why use any non-default application? Same answer for terminal emulators.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    This is a very specific question.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    > These terminal emulators all behave slightly differently That's the point. Different browsers or word processors behave completely differently. They were asking what differences there are between this and other TEs.
- robinsonrc 2y ago
  Lack of true colour support was the first thing that got me looking at other options
  - matwood 2y ago
    This. I try to stick with the built ins, but lack of true color on Terminal.app is annoying. I wouldn't consider myself an advanced terminal person, but I do all my git interactions using the terminal and like it to look nice.
- m1keil 2y ago
  I really like to copy on select in the terminal. Terminal.app used to have a hack available to add this feature in, but since SIP days, it is no longer possible.
cranberryturkey 2y ago
no windows version?
pzo 2y ago
Landing page and github README could improve: - picture or gif is worth a thousand word - it mentioned its cross-platform but I don't see support for Windows or Android - its better make it explicit it's only for macOS and Linux. Yesterday was looking for some nicer terminal on Android and was hoping ghostty could work. - I like simple landing pages but this... is too simple and not much useful (only 2 buttons and ASCII image. Why even bother with such landing page and not just stick with github README? - it doesn't provide me any fast information how to compares to different terminals and why I should switch from Warp
- grantcarthew 2y ago
  I disagree, the landing page is just fantastic. I like the product as well, however, I need to use it for a week to comment.
  - punkspider 2y ago
    I think it would help if there were more information about it, along with demos, to clearly communicate what it's about. At the moment I'm still confused because I see Ghostty has gotten so much attention, and I'm not clear why it's special. I am sold thanks to the author's authenticity, but if I had not seen this, I wouldn't know what I'm looking at. So I think it would be very helpful if there were more info on the landing page.
    - srik 2y ago
      Performance of course but native is a big part of ghostty’s appeal; there’s an article by a neovim dev that expands on that native part a bit - https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/ https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/
  - tapirl 2y ago
    I have to enable JavaScript to make it load. It seems the animation on the page requires JavaScript. So, I agree with @pzo that a GIF would be better in this case.
- 2y ago
tsrez 2y ago
This is such a cool project, looks amazing!
kaycey2022 2y ago
I love the terminal. But I'm seeing relatively high CPU usage. Maybe there's some non default setting that can reduce that?
- AndyKelley 2y ago
  Are you perhaps hitting this KDE bug? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497341 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497341
  - kaycey2022 2y ago
    I'm on macos
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
casey2 2y ago
It's pretty slow and buggy for me idk
iambvk 2y ago
Does this support the non-standard key-press, key-release, etc. events proposal by kitty project? They are necessary for nicer terminal UI projects.
- mitchellh 2y ago
  Yes.
  - iambvk 2y ago
    Cool. Thanks.
dr_kretyn 2y ago
[flagged]
- lawgimenez 2y ago
  The description is in the documentation. What’s the trouble by clicking on it? It won’t take a second.
  - dr_kretyn 2y ago
    I don't know whether it's going to take a second or half a minute. I also don't know whether there will be an answer on the first page, or there's going to be a cute image and then I'll need to find "Getting Started" to learn how to get started with unknown project. My subjective experience on the internet is that if the gate isn't labelled, there's unlikely value on the other side.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      People who are interested in this are talking about it because they're interested in it. Nobody is trying to convert you.
      - abenga 2y ago
        People who are interested in things learn about them at different times. You make it seem like it's "learn about it at the outset or gtfo".
        halostatue 2y ago
        And it might be that next month there's a different homepage with more details. For a launch where all "marketing" has been via blog post, discord, and discussions across various nerdy social media sites…I'm more than happy for them to have some fun to celebrate this. There are people who have been watching this for a few months waiting for it to go 1.0 — and, at least on day 1, "if you know, you know."
    - 2y ago
HeliumHydride 2y ago
Will the eventual windows release support GPU shaders like Windows terminal does?
johan914 2y ago
The default macOS terminal app has CMD UP/DOWN to move to previous prompts. This is one of my pet peeves about terminal apps, they seem to lack this command?
- slater 2y ago
  Not even cmd up/down, just hit up/down key, no cmd needed
  - johan914 2y ago
    There's a difference between moving the window and inserting text.
    - slater 2y ago
      Oh i thought you meant "go through previously-entered commands"
- m1keil 2y ago
  Ghostty supports it (like many other terminals) - it is called shell integration and it is supposed to be enabled by default, just like in Terminal.app.
- rererereferred 2y ago
  It works for me with cmd+shift+up/down. I had it set up with the iterm2 shell integration and it just worked.
  - djpowers 2y ago
    Just for reference, it looks like it's also bound to cmd + up/down (without shift). Documented as "jump_to_prompt" here: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#jump_to_prompt https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#jump_to_pr...
uncomplexity_ 2y ago
anyone know if this can be plugged into vscode to replace xtermjs?
- pfg_ 2y ago
  no. it's planned for the future to make a libghostty that is embeddable, and it would be up to someone to make a modification for vscode to do that (not sure if it can be done with vscode's extension api)
  - tristan957 2y ago
    VSCode would switch from xterm.js to a libghostty WASM build.
cryptozeus 2y ago
You can downvote this but Why they never put a single screen shots !
- dchest 2y ago
  The whole home page is a screenshot and two buttons.
  - mkl 2y ago
    But not showing any of the native interface elements that are supposed to set this terminal emulator apart.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      The home page is obviously going for 'quirky', but it's mad that it doesn't even say "...is a terminal emulator" anywhere. At first, I thought Ghostty was an ASCII animation library! I guess the name's suffix should've clued me in, but that's easy to overlook in a hurry.
      - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
        Somebody please read this! I thought it was some goofy JavaScript demo or something. It wasn’t until I clicked on the download link that I realized it was something else entirely. I was thinking “why does this ghost JavaScript demo thing have a download link?” and I expected it to go to some GitHub page or something The homepage is cool but on mobile it isn’t at all obvious this is software, let alone a terminal emulator. If this HN post didn’t already have like 1000 votes I probably wouldn’t have even bothered with testing the link. I would have said “cool ghost” and moved on with my day. That being said, I am looking forward to trying this as an iterm2 replacement. Iterm2 has been my default terminal on Mac since forever… it was probably the first hit for “putty for mac” or something, and I probably installed it and never even considered trying something else. It’s always “just worked”.
sss111 2y ago
Is it mining cryto? Caused my mac to slow down, CPU usage shot up to 100%, and it dropped right down after I quit it.
exabyte 2y ago
Genuinely excited to see this land! Can't wait to try it out. This could be the last piece of the puzzle to a nearly flawless terminal experience
unit149 2y ago
> support native GUIs for configuration in line with our native UI philosophy As a terminal emulator, running and building it from source in Wayland as a passive process that exists in the shell, while being a method of input-output system call management.
daft_pink 2y ago
Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever.
turnsout 2y ago
I ran into some funkiness once I ssh’d into a FreeBSD box. The shell history was wonky, and goaccess wouldn’t launch at all, complaining about the terminal environment, which I’ve never seen. With that said, this looks like an awesome project and I’ll be following it closely!
- matrixhelix 2y ago
  https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh
codetrotter 2y ago
When I try to ssh into one of my servers using this terminal I get the following: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty Connection to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx closed. (IP address removed by me.) It turned out that this is associated with how I automatically run tmux by having the following kind of config for how I connect to that server. Host server3000 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/host_specific/foo/bar/server3000/id_ed25519_baz RequestTTY yes RemoteCommand /usr/bin/env tmux new-session -A -s '%L' Whereas if I outcomment the RemoteCommand setting in my ~/.ssh/config of the laptop I'm connecting form, I can connect fine even using Ghostty as my terminal and from env | grep ^TERM= I get output TERM=xterm-256color in the initial normal shell. And if I run tmux, then inside of it from env | grep ^TERM= I get output TERM=tmux-256color So there seems to be some termcap stuff I'd have to figure out if I want to use Ghostty and still be able to run tmux automatically in the way I'm currently doing without problem when using the Terminal that ships with macOS and ssh'ing into my servers.
- matrixhelix 2y ago
  https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    Thank you. I’ll probably go with sticking their suggestion into my ssh client config SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color mentioned in the end of your link. I’ll put it next to the line where I set RemoteCommand and include a comment for myself that this SetEnv is for being able to still use RemoteCommand tmux thing even when using Ghostty.
eviks 2y ago
Since this has some plans for being the best, will it add the great unique feature of wezterm: scripting config support?
Kylejeong21 2y ago
this is way better than using warp (ai gen terminal). i'd rather use a nice-looking and well designed (UX) terminal than have to use a clunky ai native one.
- LambdaComplex 2y ago
  Warp has been around since 2020, i.e. since before the generative AI craze took off. Every HN thread about it that I've seen has been full of comments that boil down to "this seems cool but I refuse to use a terminal emulator that's full of telemetry and requires sign-in." And of course the VC-funded terminal emulator has AI shoehorned in now. I shouldn't be so surprised. tldr: you're setting a low bar
terminaltrove 2y ago
We've added Ghostty to the terminals section of Terminal Trove for comparison. https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ghostty/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ghostty/ You can find all terminals for comparison below and also the list of terminals (including Ghostty) https://terminaltrove.com/compare/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/compare/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- meitham 2y ago
  The one feature I clicked for is RtL languages support, could that be added to your comparison table please
  - terminaltrove 2y ago
    We will add this to the table, is there a quick test to check if a terminal has RtL / bidirectional language support? If there are any other features you look for in a terminal not on the comparison table please let us know!
    - meitham 2y ago
      Thanks! Another important factor I find is weather the configurations is file based or menu based.
- kseistrup 2y ago
  How come TT's categories aren't listed alphabetically?
  - terminaltrove 2y ago
    Do you mean here? https://terminaltrove.com/categories/ https://terminaltrove.com/categories/ (1) Or any other category on the page? (2) We can change (1) alphabetically if that is what you mean.
cakealert 2y ago
Should of used QT. > error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop was not provided by any .service files
- tristan957 2y ago
  You would have the same problem with Qt. You don't have the xdg-desktop-portal and an associated backend running. If you're going to build your own Linux system, you should be aware of why something is broken before making a complaint to the wrong people. In this case, you misconfigured your own system.
  - cakealert 2y ago
    Odd how a hundred other applications have no issues whatsoever then. This Portal is something from flatpak btw, no other terminal depends on it. This is likely some cancer from GTK that metastasized, anything using GTK has to lock it down tight to rely on the absolute minimum of "features".
    - tristan957 2y ago
      Then don't use it.
- SSLy 2y ago
  Should have used a grammar checker.
bonniesimon 2y ago
I've tried it out and I can notice that ghostty is a little more snappy than Alacritty. I was happy with Alacritty, but I used a face a weird issue where the whole terminal freezes. I'm not sure if this is a Alacritty issue or tmux issue. I can only confirm this by using Ghostty and checking if the same issue happens. Anyways this is a great piece of software. I've never been this hyped for a software ever before. Great work team.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
favadi 2y ago
For some reasons, the font looks thinner compare to Kitty on macOS. Not sure if it is a bug or intentional.
- theanirudh 2y ago
  Yes, it is. Try setting font-thicken = true https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#font-thicken https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#font-thicken
  - favadi 2y ago
    Thanks, that's exactly what I am used to!
danielmartins 2y ago
Looks awesome, amazing work! Any particular/strong reason for choosing Zig for this?
- yla92 2y ago
  Check "Why Zig" slide from this talk https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-pattern...
  - danielmartins 2y ago
    Thanks!
paoda 2y ago
I've been in the beta for quite a while, the only issues I had were resolved quite quickly. I never got to contribute that much in feedback since I honestly never had anything to complain about, outside of not being able to also use ghostty on Windows (lol). Congrats on 1.0! It's been a joy to use I wish everyone can enjoy this wonderful piece of software as much as I have!
microflash 2y ago
Have set it up with Nushell. It’s pretty fast while displaying really long log files. Going to sit alongside iTerm2 until I get comfortable with it. The only things I miss are (1) right click to copy paste selection (akin to Putty), and (2) profiles (I work with different shells depending on my projects and use Profiles frequently on iTerm2)
arnath 2y ago
I dunno if this was obvious to everyone but OP is one of the founders of Hashicorp
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
l0b0 2y ago
nixpkgs PR: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/368404 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/368404
- teroshan 2y ago
  Corresponding Nixpkgs-Tracker link, to track if it's merged into your branches of interest: https://nixpkgs-tracker.ocfox.me/?pr=368404 https://nixpkgs-tracker.ocfox.me/?pr=368404
iammrpayments 2y ago
I tried and it looks really nice, best christmas gift this year
yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
Looks nice, but the Quick Terminal isn't instant, so I'll stick with iTerm2. iTerm2 isn't instant either, but they feel about the same[0], although with iTerm2 the full screen Quake-mode (Quick Terminal equivalent) hides the MacOS menu bar, and Ghostty doesn't. For my taste, I want a full screen terminal, with no menu bar, no delay, and no animations, which I can toggle with a global hotkey. [0]: Actually, scratch that. I tested again, and iTerm2 opens more quickly.
lifeinthevoid 2y ago
This product just breathes craftsmanship and love. Respect and thank you!
tntxtnt 2y ago
> Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator Doesn't have a binary for Windows so it's not "cross-platform" yet.
- isametry 2y ago
  The minimum number of platforms for “cross-platform” software is by definition two (2).
sspiff 2y ago
Does this have sixel support?
- matrixhelix 2y ago
  No, and there are no plans to support it from the core developers. However, if there’s a PR, they might consider it. It supports Kitty Image Protocol
jwr 2y ago
It's the first terminal app that made me switch from Terminal.app on my Mac. It gets basically everything right, and doesn't try to have every feature. Fantastic work, thank you!
Alifatisk 2y ago
I couldn't find any screenshots, also, why is this being hyped so much? What have I missed?
- d3m0t3p 2y ago
  Just try it. I tried and the launch was so smooth that I'm keeping it a few days to test it. My current biggest problem is that I launch my terminal using the spotlight shortcut (⌘-space on mac) and while iterm2 is found when I search for term, ghostty isn't.
  - metaltyphoon 2y ago
    It took a minute for me, but it did find it. Something is off with macOS indexing. Any app that you install via brew takes a bit to show up.
    - d3m0t3p 2y ago
      I'm not complaining about the indexing (you can start the indexing by starting spotlight on and off). I'm complaining about having to search for "ghos..." instead of "term...". Because I don't don't like to remember the specific app name. But this complaint is the same for everything; when searching for Excel, I would like "Numbers" to also show up in the results. When looking for vscode I would like "Visual Studio code" to also show up, but I need to type either code, visual or studio.
      - rererereferred 2y ago
        Sounds like a feature request for spotlight to add aliases or tags. Personally I always keep a terminal open.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        Huh, you've got me curious, and the Windows start menu does in fact launch Visual Studio Code when searching for "vscode." Color me pleasantly surprised!
noisy_boy 2y ago
Compiled ok but crashed upon execution: info: ghostty version=1.0.1-main+a8e5eef1 info: ghostty build optimize=ReleaseFast info: runtime=apprt.Runtime.gtk info: font_backend=font.main.Backend.fontconfig_freetype info: dependency harfbuzz=8.4.0 info: dependency fontconfig=21402 info: renderer=renderer.OpenGL info: libxev backend=main.Backend.io_uring info(os): setlocale from env result=en_US.utf8 info(gtk): GTK version build=4.6.9 runtime=4.6.9 info: optional config file not found, not loading path=/home/xxxx/.config/ghostty/config info(config): default shell source=env value=/usr/bin/bash "vulkan-disable" is only available when building GTK with G_ENABLE_DEBUG. See GDK_DEBUG=help info(gtk): libadwaita version build=1.1.7 runtime=1.1.7 (process:164888): Adwaita-WARNING **: 19:33:13.357: Using GtkSettings:gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme with libadwaita is unsupported. Please use AdwStyleManager:color-scheme instead. error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such method “ReadOne” info(grid): loaded OpenGL 3.2 warning(grid): OpenGL version is too old. Ghostty requires OpenGL 3.3 error(gtk_surface): surface failed to realize: error.OpenGLOutdated info(sentry): sentry envelope does not contain crash, discarding System: OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64 Host: 20QVCTO1WW ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Kernel: 6.9.3-76060903-generic Uptime: 2 hours, 20 mins Packages: 5314 (dpkg), 22 (flatpak) Shell: bash 5.1.16 Resolution: 3840x2160 DE: Plasma 5.25.5 WM: KWin WM Theme: Breeze Theme: [Plasma], Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3] Icons: Papirus-Dark [Plasma], Papirus-Dark [GTK2/3] Terminal: konsole Terminal Font: JetBrains Mono 11 CPU: Intel i7-9750H (12) @ 4.500GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q GPU: Intel CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] Memory: 6307MiB / 31738MiB
- tylersmith 2y ago
  You have OpenGL 3.2 but need 3.3
  - nacs 2y ago
    Error is a little misleading. OpenGL is likely much higher than 3.3 since op is using nvidia gpu. Problem is that this application uses OpenGL ES for which 3.3 was only recently even finalized as a standard and most GPUs like nvidia don’t support.
tuananh 2y ago
- xterm still feel faster to me. - some visual artifacts with the gtk menu - sometimes prompt got clear when openning 2nd / 3rd windows - cant get keybinding quick toggle to work
- manmal 2y ago
  In case you mean the quick terminal (ctrl+`): keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal
  - tuananh 2y ago
    doesn't work for me. i'm using i3. olps, it's macOS only feature.
- l-p 2y ago
  > - some visual artifacts with the gtk menu You need a compositor. picom works. For a proper "native i3 experience" I recommend setting gtk-titlebar=false and unbinding tab/pane management keybinds. I already have a window manager, I don't need a second one. I also had to disable adwaita because when it's enabled closing a shell with ^D closes all open windows, sometimes it leaves an empty window instead. > - xterm still feel faster to me. lxterminal also launches 6 times faster, I guess on a slow laptop without a dedicated GPU these terminals are not the most efficient option.
  - tuananh 2y ago
    there's a black box after i click the burger menu button.
tecleandor 2y ago
I've been using Alacritty so I can switch back and forth from my work's Mac to my own Linux, and share the config, but I'm testing Ghostty and I'm really liking it. And no silly closed AI somethingsomething integration.
Emigre_ 2y ago
I'm excited about the fact that this is written in Zig. I'm a Kitty user at the moment, but if this delivers I'll change to Ghostty.
christophilus 2y ago
I use Foot as my terminal and Niri as my WM. It’s a great combo. Niri handles splits for me, and I don’t need tabs. I also turn off all window decorations, so my terminal content gets 100% of the terminal’s screen real estate-- so I don't need a native UI. All that said, it looks like Ghosty can be configured to match this setup, so I’ll give it a try. I just wanted to mention Foot to anyone who is running Linux. Foot is a simple, focused project.
- conaclos 2y ago
  I am a happy foot user and I am considering switching from Sway to Niri. What has been your experience with Niri? One thing that concerns me about Niri is that it is not wlroots based. This means that many tools I accustomed to don't work with Niri. Do you have some dedicated tools for screen sharing, screen recording, screen printing, multi-monitor management, ...?
  - christophilus 2y ago
    I absolutely love Niri. It has a built-in screen capture which is good enough for me. Screensharing works fine from Firefox (which is where I do all of my video conferencing). I stopped using multiple screens a long time ago, but I do occasionally hook my laptop up to my TV, and that works out of the box. Though, for stuff like that, I might log into to a Gnome + PaperWM session simply because I don’t remember how to fiddle with things, and I’m not generally trying to optimize for my workflow when I’m giving a live talk or watching TV.
- ramon156 2y ago
  Is it weird that I never considered foot because of the name? At least when you say "alacritty" i understand that it's a terminal. When I tell someone I use "foot"... I don't know, it doesn't give a good feeling.
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    What about when you tell someone you "cat" a file or use "sudo"? Who cares what normies think?
diimdeep 2y ago
Nice addition. Slightly more CPU heavy than Kitty. in MacOS yabai tiling manager has problems dealing with native tabs, that's gonna annoy me like with Finder. also in MacOS try pressing "Cmd + Shift + \", also works in Finder, it's there, it's cool, but I never use it.
- rererereferred 2y ago
  That's neat but how do I select a panel afterwards? Arrow keys do nothing and hjkl start a search.
  - crabique 2y ago
    On my system it's ctrl+tab to cycle through tabs, then escape to open the one that is currently highlighted.
rauanm 2y ago
I tried to install and play around with it, it's really nice. Took a bit of tinkering to set a theme and my favourite Pragmata Pro, but what ultimately annoys me is the lack of 'turnkey' selecting for text. When I run `Cmd + A`, I want my terminal to make a full text selection of an entered command, not of the screen content. Or when I run `Option + Shift + Arrow left/right`, I want to select words from an entered command, not to type '4D;4C;4D;4C'. I'm not a vimer or emacser, I want to have normal macos experience. For this reason alone I thought it's too early to switch and Warp is still great for me.
- rauanm 2y ago
  But `ghostty +list-themes` is damn impressive.
- vrnvu 2y ago
  Cmd+A to select the entered command isn't standard. You could try: - Ctrl+A: Move to the beginning of the line. - Ctrl+E: Move to the end of the line. - Ctrl+K: Cut the command from the cursor position to the end. - Ctrl+U: Cut the command from the cursor to the beginning of the line. - Ctrl+Y: Paste the text back. This should work in all terminals.
  - rauanm 2y ago
    You're just forcing me to be a vimer at this point. :) By normal macos experience I mean key bindings for regular text fields, not regular terminal (whatever they're supposed to be). Afaik, Warp was the first one ever to treat terminal input as a regular text field input.
  - metaltyphoon 2y ago
    Ctrl+W: delete last word
- eviks 2y ago
  Good ideas (and possible in Wezterm if shell marks the semantic zones, not sure whether possible if not), though not really a normal macos experience given mac's default terminal doesn't select of an entered command on Cmd+A
jFriedensreich 2y ago
Am I the only person wondering why we need 100 terminal emulators when there are only 2 or 3 solutions to using command line tools more like a REPL? (to some degree warp, some bash support in hydrogen, advanced edit mode of powershell) I don't care for using "fancy" TUIs all i want is better tooling to interact with these that does not feel like 1970 and more like the chrome console.
- __float 2y ago
  > I saw tradeoffs that I didn't like. I saw features that I wanted. I saw performance that I could improve. I saw stagnation. There are many fantastic terminals out there and you should use them if they work for you. But I wanted something different and thought maybe others did too. This motivation is pretty clearly stated in the article. Some people use "fancy TUIs" (the famous editors vim and emacs surely count) and if you don't, feel free to ignore this new option.
  - CarlitosHighway 2y ago
    Unfortunately, launching a fancy TUI like lazydocker inside a fresh install of Ghostty will make the TUI exit with an error, when the same TUI runs just fine on iTerm, alacritty, etc.
styfle 2y ago
Congratulations! I was hoping 1.0 would mean CMD+F search would work, but looks like that was pushed back to a later release unfortunately. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomment-2558909414 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomme...
rharb 2y ago
Congratulations on making it to the launch! I really appreciate the levelheadedness of your responses regarding Ghostty, and how clear you are to be speaking positively for your thing instead of negatively about anyone else's. Going to build it at lunch today and give it a shot :)
linsomniac 2y ago
Does Ghostty support TiteInhibit? The docs say "if xterm does something we should do it", but I don't see any mention of "tite".
rplnt 2y ago
Is there a way to restore session (windows, tabs, paths) after (application) start? How is this not default everywhere is beyond me (looking at Firefox). But my main point here would be that the lack of explorable configuration, and the docs not having any search, make it quite challenging search for this.
- pacifika 2y ago
  Are you saying Firefox doesn’t restore state?
Gormo 2y ago
Looks interesting. I'm playing around with it on Linux (with Xfce), but can't figure out how to get rid of the CSD header bar / hamburger menu and use a normal menu bar instead. I see Mac screenshots with a normal Mac-style menu bar, but I don't see how to enable the equivalent on Linux. The `window-theme` and `window-decoration` options do not seem to do anything.
- tux1968 2y ago
  They should work if you exit and restart ghostty.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    Thanks, that worked. Apparently, the reload-config hotkey doesn't always work for certain changes. In this case, setting `gtk-titlebar = false` disabled the header bar -- only issue now is that there is no menu bar at all!
pilgrim0 2y ago
I would love to try but it doesn’t support Monterey
rplnt 2y ago
> Split Right | Split Down Thanks for this. After 7 years of using iterm2 I still don't know what will happen with the ambiguous "Split Horizontally | Split Vertically". I know the issue is I'm thinking about it and should just learn it, but it would be more helpful if it was named "Split A | Split B". (might be a non-native language problem)
- robertlutece 2y ago
  I think it ambiguous. vim has vsplit ("Like |:split|, but split vertically.") that is "split right", however, wezterm has "Split Vertically (Top/Bottom). Split the current pane vertically into two panes, by spawning the default program into the bottom half"
- dcre 2y ago
  I’m a native English speaker and I also have trouble with this. When the panes are arranged horizontally, the line dividing them is vertical.
stainablesteel 2y ago
looks really cool! i'm gonna play with it, thanks for this awesome project
quantonganh 2y ago
You mentioned that Ghostty gets around 500 FPS, but I tested it myself and only got 160 FPS on M1 Pro (WezTerm gets 400 FPS). What can be the reason?
dabdab44 2y ago
text is missing left padding on macOS otherwise nice
- poetril 2y ago
  There is a config setting for this “window-padding-x” I believe.
xtat 2y ago
My takeaway is that it's mostly useful for apple stuff-- why would "platform native" matter on Linux?
- ur-whale 2y ago
  You should try it. I'm on Linux, and first impression is ghostty is really good. Speed in particular is impressive.
aleden 2y ago
I went to ghostty.org and spent a long time staring at that animated ghost, and thought of clippy. Except this guy seems to have wider range of emotions. Anyways, I eventually learned this was about a terminal emulator (which is awesome), but the ghost on the front page really inspired my imagination. I think it would be a good thing to have some kind of companion like that, when it's me, by myself, constantly surrounded by terminals all day. Is the choice of having the ghost be rendered in a text-mode terminal important? I think it is for me.
codedokode 2y ago
I have a traumatic experience with GPU-based GUI. Long time ago I tried to run Ubuntu in a VM, and they switched to GPU-based rendering. But as VM doesn't have a GPU, the system fell back to something called "llvmpipe". The result was that the widgets reacted approximately with 30 second lag to every action. So what I am asking, if you are making a GPU-based rendering toolkit, please write also SIMD software fallback without shaders. Remember how fast Windows 95 was and make it a little bit faster.
- pvillano 2y ago
  I am asking this in good faith Why would you not ssh?
  - codedokode 2y ago
    Because I wanted to see how a new Ubuntu looked. Not to do something useful.
  - codedokode 2y ago
    Also to SSH into a VM you need to setup a second network card and to do this you need at least log into a text console.
yourapostasy 2y ago
Neat, this [1] looks like the project uses vttest [2] to test DEC VT terminal compatibility? [1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md [2] https://invisible-island.net/vttest/ https://invisible-island.net/vttest/
CSDude 2y ago
I wanted something as fast as Alacritty that had native tabs, could divide horizontal/vertical without tmux. And this seems like it!
lopkeny12ko 2y ago
To be honest, I don't "get" ghostty. I am not really seeing how this is so much better than the GNOME terminal that ships with my Linux distro. A lot of people are claiming that ghostty is "faster." I watched the lightning talk where the author claims that catting files and binaries is faster. I tried this against ghostty itself after building with zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast, using: time cat ghostty. In GNOME terminal, it took 3.340s. In ghostty, it took 16.947s. I must be doing something wrong?
- infensus 2y ago
  Are there any use cases for running `cat` on a binary without at least piping it somewhere? The output will be mostly garbage
- matrixhelix 2y ago
  The cool part is that you don’t have to “get” Ghostty, you can continue using whatever you prefer
thornewolf 2y ago
i use the base mac/Windows terminals and have never had any issues. what are the main things that draw people to alternatives?
- ur-whale 2y ago
  > what are the main things that draw people to alternatives? Speed.
ur-whale 2y ago
Real nice so far. The fact it does its own window decoration is a bit of a turn-off, but: A quick test of speed against wezterm and gnome-terminal show ghostty (on my laptop) to be around 3 times faster than both of the other. Will definitely try it for a couple of weeks.
geodel 2y ago
I wonder if there is any equivalent of 'iterm2 broadcast input' in ghostty. I use this pattern to deploy same application on multiple servers or checking logs on multiple servers for same service.
vinhnx 2y ago
Everything about it is so polished, it’s hard to believe it’s just a v1.0.0 release! The only thing I’m eagerly waiting for now is the implementation of search [1], but otherwise, it’s absolutely stellar.! I set Ghostty as my default terminal emulator now. [1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
aizk 2y ago
Wow, I had no idea ghostty was this much of a big deal. Really cool!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brundolf 2y ago
What's the elevator pitch vs other terminals?
CarlitosHighway 2y ago
Love this in theory but the first time user experience could be improved: $ brew install ghostty Launch it, don't configure anything, in the new terminal window then enter: $ lazydocker Response: 2024/12/28 09:04:42 An error occurred! Please create an issue at https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues *exec.ExitError exit status 1 /home/runner/work/lazydocker/lazydocker/main.go:96 (0x9397d7) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/internal/atomic/types.go:194 (0x43bc1b) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:1650 (0x46b9e1) Which does not happen with fresh out of the box Mac Terminals, iTerm. Probably it would be good to have less specific default options for people who just want to try it out before starting to configure it.
- adamdecaf 2y ago
  That’s a problem with lazydocker, not ghostty. Maybe contribute to https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues/610 https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues/610 ?
  - CarlitosHighway 2y ago
    Do you have anything to back up this claim? Because it only crashes in Ghostty, and no other terminal emu I tried it in. Anyway, not my problem, I will just wait until it's fixed and if not, then I'll use one of the gazillion other ones that work 100%.
    - pjz 2y ago
      Crashing due to lack of a sufficient terminfo is indeed more of a lazydocker problem than a ghostty problem. See the issue above for a workaround.
graynk 2y ago
Looks pretty cool! Unfortunately I can't use it yet, as I am on a Ubuntu-based distro (Pop! OS 22.04), so my GTK version is not high enough. I imaging that's the case for a lot of people who stick to LTS versions. I may check it out on my Mac for work though
bpev 2y ago
So i've basically been a terminal.app purist, but downloaded ghostty on a whim because of all the excitement... I did not realize it would be THAT much faster. I guess I should have started using better terminals earlier
lgxz 2y ago
There are MANY problems with the default configuration. For example, the UP/DOWN key doesn't work, the TERM is xterm-ghostly...
mike31fr 2y ago
Many people here seem impressed about speed/performance. I have been using all sorts of terminals / emulators over the past 20 years and it never occurred to me a terminal can be slow. When I type a command, I just get the result instantaneously, for any terminal. What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow?
- umvi 2y ago
  > What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow? Rendering huge stdout/stderr can be a bottleneck. Try running a program that writes half a million lines of text to stdout without file redirects and a lot of terminal emulators will struggle to keep up.
- mike31fr 2y ago
  TESTED: 1. Create a file with 1 million lines: for i in {1..1000000}; do echo "Line $i: This is a test of terminal performance."; done > bigfile.txt 2. cat the file and see how much time it takes: time cat bigfile.txt RESULTS: - iterm2: 3.5s - Default macOS terminal: 2.3s - Ghostty: 1.8s
- danhau 2y ago
  I don‘t get it either. The only use case I can see is for programs that output basically a video feed in text form. A commenter in this thread mentioned sifting through log / debug output… but why wouldn‘t you pipe it to a file instead?
- itsn0tm3 2y ago
  I think this mostly plays a role when using modal text editors like vim in your terminal. Speed matters so very much then! Give it a try if you want ;)
  - mike31fr 2y ago
    Have you ever experienced vim being slow? If so, would you know how I could reproduce this?
anaumann 2y ago
Took me only ten minutes to tweak the config to my liking and recreate my color scheme from iterm. I’ve been using Ghostty for a day now and it simply works. Smooth, seamless and perfectly integrated to the point where this should just be the default terminal in macOS. P.S.: If you want to port your iterm color scheme, set: window-colorspace = display-p3 for the colors to match. (And bold-is-bright = true if you set this option in iterm)
denolfe 2y ago
I took this for a spin today. Coming from a long-time iTerm2 user, the first thing I noticed was how snappy everything feels, especially when resizing the window. The straight-forward configuration was extremely nice as well and can be stored in my dotfiles now (iTerm was a giant dump of XML). A few things that keep me from switching to it full time: - Missing search scrollback (cmd+f). This appears to be coming soon: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 - More of a nitpick than anything, but the only way to disable cursor blinking is to disable shell integration. Unfortunately, this means taking away things like native scrolling and likely some other things I don't know about. I see there is a discussion here to possibly address this: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812 I feel like this would be a no-brainer switch for me once the above are addressed.

2319 points by matrixhelix 2y ago

General question, how safe is it to use non-stock os terminals? In the end often they need to receiver super user at some point.

PhilipRoman 2y ago
I would say it's about as safe as using any other program. On Linux, by default you will not get any isolation within the same user context. So if your account has access to sudo (regardless whether with password or not), assume that any program you've ever run on that account also has sudo access. There are sandboxes and selinux but neither is used consistently enough on consumer systems.

artooro 2y ago

This happens to be exactly what I was looking for in a Terminal app. Native UI, fast, and native screen splitting, doesn't try to do too much. Five stars

ahmadabouadla 2y ago

Beautiful

clayrisser 2y ago

Just packaged Ghostty for Debian. https://github.com/clayrisser/debian-ghostty https://github.com/clayrisser/debian-ghostty

FlipFloopDev 2y ago

No cmd+f / ctrl+f ?? I'm sorry what?

7edrubep 2y ago

how to set tabs to vertical view like in iterm2 ? i googled a lot, but didn't find any

7edrubep 2y ago

how to set tabs to vertical left view like in iterm2? also how to set color\name to the particular tab?

mrjbq7 2y ago

This is a neat blog post explaining part of the magic: https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/ https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

VeejayRampay 2y ago

thanks Mitchell for all the hard work, it's nice to see quality and competition in this field

leetrout 2y ago

I'm very excited to have this because it's the first bit of high quality open source software to hit the streets in a while. I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future. Thank you, Mitchell! [0] https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/

progbits 2y ago
> I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future. That's a weird statement. I've been running a free, open-source and subscription-less browser (firefox) and terminal emulator (many) for close to 20 years. Actually I like what ladybird is doing in the browser space, given firefox is quite dependent on google cash. But this is just yet another terminal emulator in a sea of them. The only two distinguishing features I can see are hype and native UI (which mac users care about for some reason -- my native UI is a borderless rectangle in tiling WM).
- SG- 2y ago
  native UI is so much more than how a border of a window looks like.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    What is native UI in this context? My terminal emulator is also always basically a full-screen black textarea with white letters. No window borders, no tabs, no buttons, no menus, nothing else. Is there anything native UI would give me in this case (and what is a native UI, I can't find it defined anywhere)?
    - nateb2022 2y ago
      > The big picture of "native" is that Ghostty is designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment. > On macOS, the GUI is written in Swift and uses AppKit and SwiftUI. (https://ghostty.org/docs/about#native https://ghostty.org/docs/about#native)

feznyng 2y ago

The author has a dev log I’d recommend if you’re curious about what makes it different + general goodies on Zig/terminal emulators. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

stmonty 2y ago

Awesome, I have been waiting for this since you originally announced it. I also enjoyed the blog posts.

icapybara 2y ago

Congratulations

kristopolous 2y ago

I assume this is mostly a mac thing? The effort to get this up and running on debian appears to be a bit more work than normal.

SG- 2y ago
it's a Mac and Linux thing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mrjbq7 2y ago
$ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git $ cd ghostty $ zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast $ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty
- beanjuiceII 2y ago
  tried this doesn't work do i need some specific zig version?
  - eddythompson80 2y ago
    0.13.0 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37424c7210d1230242c709e990/build.zig#L30 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37... The full script is pretty much: $ wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.... $ tar xvf zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz $ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git $ cd ghostty $ ../zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast $ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty
    - tlhunter 2y ago
      Looks like there are a few deps needed: sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev git Otherwise you'll get this error: error: unable to spawn glib-compile-resources: FileNotFound Build Summary: 78/83 steps succeeded; 2 failed (disable with --summary none) install transitive failure └─ install ghostty transitive failure └─ zig build-exe ghostty ReleaseFast native transitive failure ├─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.c) failure └─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.h) failure error: the following build command failed with exit code 1: /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache/o/57acb02f2b1ccf1b03b9597a8c5f2d09/build /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache /home/tlhunter/.cache/zig --seed 0xb4306e7d -Z11426c6f3a70c8b9 -Doptimize=ReleaseFast ``` I'm quite surprised they don't provide a .deb package as that checks off 90% of Linux users.

do_not_redeem 2y ago

I just want to say thanks for the minimum-contrast option: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#minimum-contrast https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#minimum-contrast I've grown so sick of tools/TUIs that output unreadable text (like Debian's ls that defaults to dark-blue-on-black for directories). I look forward to never manually theming a terminal app again!

thenipper 2y ago
This is great. I’m middle aged and I’ve definitely noticed my eyesight needs more and more help in the contrast dept
rand0m4r 2y ago
thanks for sharing
commandersaki 2y ago
Another goodie is selection-foreground and selection-background config to set the colour for highlight selection, makes a massive difference when it's something you can choose rather than the translucent crap on mac, or the defaults on Windows/Linux.

sitkack 2y ago

Is there a bounty for zero days?

sitkack 2y ago
https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/GHSA-5hcq-3j4q-4v6p https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...
selectnull 2y ago
Yes, your name will forever be on that pull request.
- sitkack 2y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

BSDobelix 2y ago

So I will see how well it works on FreeBSD, but I love the development model, keeping it "closed" for the 1.0 (focus and polish), I have not tested it yet, but it already "feels" like professional engineering work.

wutwutwat 2y ago
source is open https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
- afatparakeet 2y ago
  Only as of 1.0 release I believe was their point.

Jarred 2y ago

I've been using Ghostty for several months now (used Alacritty before that). Ghostty is really, really good. It's fast, it gets the text rendering right (many cross-platform terminals struggle with this), and it has all the features I need. It's also some very well-written Zig code. We use some of the code for graphemes in Bun for `Bun.stringWidth`.

SnowingXIV 2y ago
Likewise coming from alacritty myself. This out of the box gives me everything I really want and does it well. Not to mention the development process was quite refreshing to see. Decision making process for sane defaults and to allow customization quite easily. Nicely done.

modernerd 2y ago

Ghostty has a hard-to-find "quake mode" that may interest some. During the beta I had it configured like this on macOS: keybind = global:cmd+space=toggle_quick_terminal quick-terminal-animation-duration = 0.1 There isn't an option to set the default height of the "quick terminal" window that I'm aware of but you can drag the bottom of the window after it opens and it will persist between toggles.

alejoar 2y ago
This is the first thing I went looking for when looking at the docs, thank you.
- swyx 2y ago
  what does quake mode do?
  - vorpalhex 2y ago
    Scroll down from top on any screen
  - diggan 2y ago
    Comes from video games where you usually can hit ~ (tilde) or other character to make a in-game console appear, usually sliding down from above or at least in the top half/third/quarter of the screen. Popularized by Quake and games from that heritage (like Source engine) I suppose. Desktop equivalent is that you have a terminal available at a short-cut/button-press that will always show it but not fully hide the rest, no matter what other context you're in. Pretty handy.
    - swyx 2y ago
      TIL. thank you for taking the time to answer - wasnt obvious from above whether or not this was some kind of joke easter egg thing
      - 2y ago

fishgoesblub 2y ago

I initially scoffed when I read "platform-native UI" as I've found programs made in Electron typically proclaim something similar when they are anything but native, so when I saw it used GTK for Linux (SwiftUI for MacOS) my interests were piqued. Always fun to mess around with new terminal emulators. edit: alas, it doesn't support bitmap fonts..

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
Thanks for this post, first thing I did was search "bitmap" in the thread. If I can't use Terminus (+Unifont fallback), it's not for me.
- TheSmoke 2y ago
  fyi, I have just tried Unifont and worked perfectly.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Curious as to how much it matters; if a TTF font looks similar and is fast?
  - BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
    > if a TTF font looks similar It doesn't, especially on average DPI monitors. Oh, you mean the OTF trick.
- fishgoesblub 2y ago
  It was the first thing I check whenever I try a new terminal. If Terminus doesn't work then the terminal doesn't work for me.
opan 2y ago
>it doesn't support bitmap fonts Very disappointing. Not sure why people are trying to kill off bitmap support in everything these days. Will stick with foot.

videlov 2y ago

I have found the following community site for generating Ghostty config quite helpful https://ghostty.zerebos.com/ https://ghostty.zerebos.com/

elAhmo 2y ago
This is great, thanks! It would be amazing if CMD + , would open this directly.
- shpx 2y ago
  I uninstalled the app when I saw that Cmd+, opens an empty text file called config. I'm not going to learn more configuration languages or type 30 characters (or paste them from the browser) to toggle a binary setting.
  - computerfriend 2y ago
    Aren't plaintext configuration files standard? It's how I configure most applications (and how I like it, because it makes the configuration shareable). As a DSL, it's key-value pairs. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
    - rplnt 2y ago
      It's a desktop/GUI application. It's definitely not a standard for those, no. I share the OPs frustation that I don't even know what I can configure and have to search web to be able to change something. And while the documentation is nice, it's not exactly great for this. Also, having an explorable and searchable UI doesn't mean it's not saved in the same shareable and readable file.
    - agos 2y ago
      no, especially for an app that boasts to be "native"
    - wpm 2y ago
      The ultimate end format for the config stored on disc is completely irrelevant to how the config is created. Simple doesn’t mean easy to experiment with, simple to understand, fast to write and so on. No one is confused as to how the ghostty config works. Key value pairs. Sure. A window full of GUI controls and system color pickers can create that config file, or I can manually by hand. I’d prefer the former.

loeg 2y ago

> For example, on macOS, Ghostty supports Quick Look, force touch, the macOS secure input API, built-in window state recovery on restart, etc. These are all native APIs provided by macOS that don't have equivalents in Linux desktop environments. I believe window state recovery has some approximate equivalent in GNOME and KDE, but maybe not exactly the same (and I don't know how easy it is to integrate with).

eliaspro 2y ago
On X11, Gnome and KDE Plasma supported session/state restore, but this was based on XSMP and couldn't be simply reused for Wayland. There's an ongoing standardization effort to provide equivalent functionality for Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... KDE Plasma provides a "fake session restore" for the time being: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/3523 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...
- loeg 2y ago
  Ah, good to know.

ksec 2y ago

This feels like the Vagrant moment [1] again. Cant believe 15 years have passed already. Together with Bun I believe that is two high profile open source software made with Zig. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

BrouteMinou 2y ago
Wayland WM "River" is great too.
ajoseps 2y ago
and it’s the same guy
ivve 2y ago
What do you mean the "vagrant moment"?

alberth 2y ago

For those who don’t have the background: - created by Mitchell (founder of HashiCorp) - it’s developed in Zig (and Mitchell recently pledge $300k to Zig foundation) - uses native UI (which is super rare for cross platform app) - amazingly performant. e.g. https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362 - has lots of amazing small details like below https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113443002518588524 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113443002518588524 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113166930440000852 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113166930440000852 This has been a passion project of his for the past 2-years and he’s completely MIT open sourced it. He’s spent a lot of time thinking and ensuring this project can persist in the future even without him. Many people have tremendous respect for Mitchell’s technical abilities, as well as hugely respect how he operates (genuinely nice person and thinks about things long-term and does the hard work for sustainability). Lots more to read at: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
saberience 2y ago
It doesn't work in Windows so how is it cross platform? Also, I've been using terminals since DOS in 1990 and never once have I had to say, "I wish this terminal had more performance", so I'm not sure that performance is really relevant here. If I write a command to build my project which takes 10 mins to build, does it matter whether the terminal command ran in 10 milliseconds vs 1 millisecond? In the linked speed demo one command was 8 milliseconds faster than another. Ok? Is a terminal written in Zig better than one made in C++ or Rust? Again, unsure why its relavant at all.
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  > It doesn't work in Windows so how is it cross platform? Linux and macOS are different platforms. Would calling it multi-platform make you happier? > Also, I've been using terminals since DOS in 1990 and never once have I had to say, "I wish this terminal had more performance", I remember the Windows terminal being unbearably slow in the past and wishing it had better performance. Maybe this just isn’t for you.

sureglymop 2y ago

Does it support Ctrl+Scroll to zoom? Somehow I got used to this years ago and unfortunately not a lot of software supports it. Have been using Wezterm until now, which does.

sionisrecur 2y ago
That's usually a feature of the Desktop Environment. If you configure it there then it works everywhere.

baq 2y ago

[flagged]

eikenberry 2y ago
Windows support is planned.
qup 2y ago
How many platforms are required? I noticed it doesn't have an OS/2 download.
- metadaemon 2y ago
  missing z/OS as well...
- azinman2 2y ago
  I think it’s both fair to say Linux and Mac make something cross platform, but it’s also very reasonable to expect Windows as well given its massive install base size.
- timeon 2y ago
  How is that relevant here? You should have named Android [0] because that is only platform that has more users than Windows. [0] But that one is still Linux.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    But defining it by total users isn't very useful either - in this case, "total users who regularly use a terminal" would be a far more relevant factor. I think the only reasonable, useful, general definition of "cross-platform" is "runs on at least 2 of the 3 main desktop platforms".
loeg 2y ago
No, cross-platform just means more than one platform. It obviously is that: Mac and Linux.

thiht 2y ago

I’ve been very disappointed with Alacritty (no support for split term in favor of tmux) and WezTerm (insane config format, config has no business using a full fledged programming language) feature wise, so I have high hopes regarding Ghostty, can’t wait to try it!

medimikka 2y ago
Config being a programming language has insane advantages. Not only can I error check my config in vim or Visual Code, I can do insane things with logic that just don't work in other config file approaches. My laptop is connected to a 32" 4k monitor at work, standalone while traveling, and to a 27" 2k at home. WezTerm "knows" that, and sets things such as font size and line height automagically. Even more, I can have split logic based on window size, window titles that show me who also checked out a file while I am inside an editor, even per-window color and font schemes. All apps should use something like Lua for their config.
- thiht 2y ago
  It's great that you (and many others) find it useful, but I genuinely have no idea what this is about. I switch my iTerm from my 13" MBP, 32" monitor, and iPad all the time, and I don't need any config to make it work. Maybe I just don't care enough about this stuff but I don't see what I would even configure this way. Anyway, this is the reason I love the new wave of terminals, they bring new stuff on the table and anyone can find one they love. I just installed Ghostty and it works as I expect out of the box, with even less config (0) than I have on iTerm. And it's fast. Now I just hope they'll add a config UI some day (one of the reasons I prefer static config files: you can't really get a UI with a programming language) and I'll be in terminal heaven
  - eviks 2y ago
    If you don't care about this stuff you'll just as easily configure in a static key=value table whatever you like, lua doesn't limit you here. It's benefits are all optional
- 2y ago

mikkelam 2y ago

I have honestly been so excited to try this after listening to several videos of mitchell talking about his work. What a christmas present! A terminal is so dear to us software engineers, and this seems like such a love declaration to the terminal. Time to spend hours tuning my config!

jedisct1 2y ago

This is by far the best terminal emulator I've ever used.

mitchellh 2y ago

<3 This has been a work of passion for the past two years of my life (off and on). I hope anyone who uses this can feel the love and care I put into this, and subsequently the amazing private beta community (all ~5,000 strong!) that helped improve and polish this into a better release than I ever could alone. Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that there is a good group of EXCELLENT terminals out there, and I'm not claiming Ghostty is strictly better than any of them. Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices. Shout out to Kitty, WezTerm, Foot in particular. iTerm2 gets some hate for being relatively slow but nothing comes close to touching it in terms of feature count. Rio is a super cool newer terminal, too. The world of terminals is great. I’ve posted a personal reflection here, which has a bit more history on why I started this, what’s next, and some of the takeaways from the past two years. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection

jdmg94 2y ago
how did you decided on building for arch and NixOS but not for red hat or debian?
the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
Thanks so much for this. I really enjoy using it and I also refer to the source code quite a bit as I'm trying to get more familiar with Zig :)
indigodaddy 2y ago
Looks really awesome. I'm going to sound like I don't belong in the hipster terminal club, but the reason I shied away from some of the other terminals is the lack of tabs, which looks like yours has when I did a quick Google question/search. (if wezterm and the like have them, I must have missed it or it wasn't obviously apparent in the settings how to achieve them). I know everyone will say but tmux and/or native multiplexing bla, but I'm kind of old school and only do screen remotely if needed, and I just like a lot of terminal tabs in my workflow with a quick mod left/right arrow to navigate between (and if native multiplexing in Ghostty is simple and easy I'd probably do some of that too). Perhaps this is why I've never left iterm2.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments) Ghostty Devlog 004 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709113 - Sept 2023 (2 comments) Talk: Ghostty and Some Useful Zig Patterns - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491031 - Sept 2023 (2 comments) Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty Devlog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36736686 - July 2023 (1 comment)

luckydata 2y ago

Could someone give me an idea why I would want to use this instead of any other terminal?

jeremy_k 2y ago
Same request. As someone who uses the standard Teriminal application on my MBP I'm wondering what benefits I might find from Ghostty
- spopejoy 2y ago
  I think "vanilla" terminal users such as myself (e.g. I don't do a bunch of screen/tmuxing, I don't code in terminals etc) probably are not the target audience. I've had zero issues with standard macos terminal ( once I realized how to speed up key repeat in system settings that is), so I assume I don't need this.
  - jeremy_k 2y ago
    Makes a lot of sense, I fall into the same bucket as you so thank you for the response. I use the terminal to start up services and issue git commands. Beyond that, not too much.
  - luismedel 2y ago
    Same club here. I feel comfortable even with the crappiest terminal out there, as far as it allows me to write commands and read/copy output. Even the terminal in the Inferno OS felt good enough for me, like 20 years ago.
orliesaurus 2y ago
simplicity, feels zen-mode vs a lot of over-the-top-terminals these days also (from the docs): > Ghostty supports the Kitty graphics protocol, light/dark mode notifications, hyperlinks, and more. This lets terminal applications like Neovim, Zellij, and others do more than they could in other terminal emulators. Application features are higher-level features that are useful for interacting with the terminal emulator itself. For example, Ghostty supports native tabs, splits, a drop-down terminal on macOS, theme switching on system dark/light mode, etc.

frou_dh 2y ago

I wonder how the colour rendering is. Usually when I configure some editor in a terminal to use specific #rrggbb 24bit colours I like, the end result does not render the same as in non-terminal software (confirmed in the past with an eye-dropper tool).

999900000999 2y ago

Has anyone put up an Arch Aur yet ?

SG- 2y ago
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Thanks! This is why I love HN. I had already installed from source, but this makes updating easier after all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gpanders 2y ago
  Note the AUR package was removed because it's since been packaged in the official Arch repos. There is a ghostty-git AUR repo for tracking the main branch: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty-git https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghostty-git
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    Will Arch auto migrate the Aur package for me, or should I uninstall and install from the repo.
dsp_person 2y ago
AUR not even needed https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/
- guerrilla 2y ago
  How... did that get in there so fast? I just updated a couple of hours ago and it wasn't there. Now it is.

antirez 2y ago

After a quick test this looks incredibly good and fast. I'll use it as a terminal for the next weeks to see how it goes, but I have good feelings. Thank you so much for writing it. EDIT: WOOOW, for me this is going to be a game changer. I was just working at Redis stuff outputting a ton of debugging info and results, and normally the terminal was the bottleneck, and here instead it printed half million of results in the blink of an eye. And then I could go back in the history without any performance degradation. I love this: for development of systems it makes a big difference.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tessierashpool9 2y ago
why don't you just pipe it into a file and then less it? if your redis stuff prints so much stuff you might want to reevaluate the respective program logic.
- btheunissen 2y ago
  Telling to creator of Redis that they might want to reevaluate their respective program logic (Redis) is pretty funny, only on HN :)
  - antirez 2y ago
    Haha, the question makes sense per se but there are definitely times where you want to see the output in real time. I'm a big fan of printf-debugging :D
    - noisy_boy 2y ago
      It feels good to hear support for printf-debugging coming from such esteemed corner. I have been doing that for a significant majority of my career instead of dropping into debugger. The side effect is you become pretty good at crafting meaningful logs.
  - deleted 2y ago

bun_terminator 2y ago

The little it says about what this even is seems to be wrong. This is not cross-platform at all

mitchellh 2y ago
It works on both macOS and Linux.
SG- 2y ago
Windows is a third class citizen when it comes to the development world.
- metaltyphoon 2y ago
  Lmao this statement is so funny.
- justmarc 2y ago
  It's its own doing
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]

nhumrich 2y ago

In case anyone is wondering, this terminal appears to work just great on windows by using WSLg. I installed on linux inside WSL, then launched it, and it looks/works great. Clipboard also works.

attentive 2y ago
Did you have to build it? On which OS?
- nhumrich 2y ago
  I used Arch. It was already in the AUR, but I believe it did build from source
eapotapov 2y ago
Thanks! I did it, but I'm having problems with window resizing and mouse selection. When I try to resize the window, the actual window is smaller than it appears. Did you encounter the same issue? Related issues: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1008 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/633 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/633
- eapotapov 2y ago
  oh, it's actually a problem with ultra-wide screens and there is no simple resolution for this and I gave up https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/590 https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/590

st3fan 2y ago

Looks great. Eagerly waiting to be able to "Use Left Option as Esc+" like iTerm has. Without it, it is nearly impossible to use Emacs.

zimpenfish 2y ago
Was just looking for how to configure this globally. You can create a keybind for every key[0][1] but that's a bit silly faff nonsense in current year 2024. [0] e.g. `keybind = alt+f=esc:f` [1] Which affects both option keys, sadly.
- lilyball 2y ago
  See `macos-option-as-alt`
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    Ah, damn it, I searched for "meta" and completely missed that. Apologies to Ghostty!
lilyball 2y ago
Look for `macos-option-as-alt`. The Ghostty docs use the term "Alt" here to mean using the key as a terminal input modifier rather than for macOS text input. This setting allows you to specify only one option key to use this behavior for.
samatman 2y ago
I have this as a system-wide mapping with Karabiner. Complex modifications, "Post esc if left_alt is pressed alone". There's never a time when I wouldn't want this to work, may as well enable it everywhere. Edit: It looks like I misunderstood what that setting in iTerm does. But hey if you do want left option to send Esc by itself, that's how to get it.

sigmonsays 2y ago

any nix users aware of a derivation?

vluft 2y ago
there's a flake in the official repo that works fine for me (nixos unstable)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

rewgs 2y ago

Overall nice, but I'm bummed to be running into some bugs regarding a few key binding assignments. Though, I could just be missing something due to the somewhat spartan docs. Given all the time and hype, I'd have hoped that wrinkles like this would've been ironed out by launch time. Back to Wezterm for now, but I'll certainly be checking back in at some point.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jhatemyjob 2y ago

Upon installing this, I went straight for this part of the documentation: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-fullscreen https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-f... Unfortunately the "tabs not working in non-native fullscreen" thing is a dealbreaker for me, so I will be switching back to iTerm 2. But Ghostty as a whole looks promising. I like zig, zig-objc, MIT license, libghostty, config via text file. I will check back every month or so because I really want to use this. But my hate for macOS native fullscreen outweighs everything else. Edit: Ok here we go, this is why it's not implemented: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomment-1802547697 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomme... There's more than one workaround which is superior in my opinion: https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png IIRC you can even use AppKit to remove the close/minimize/fullscreen buttons, so it would just be a blank bar. You could go a step further and use private APIs / objc runtime voodoo to set the height of the titlebar to 0. That might outside your design philosophy though. Also, FYI, clicking the green fullscreen button still uses macOS native fullscreen, so you definitely want to disable that button (which is a public AppKit API) when you have that option enabled

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

block_dagger 2y ago

Nice work! How does this compare to Warp?

do_not_redeem 2y ago
- open source - faster - no AI bloat - no telemetry - no obnoxious warning banner if you run without admin access - no VCs that will enshittify the app in a few years - doesn't require an internet connection and an account to access motherfucking bash on your local machine
- alecthomas 2y ago
  Preach!

c2xlZXB5Cg1 2y ago

Startup time was very bad until I disabled adwaita with gtk-adwaita = false

YorickPeterse 2y ago
This sounds like an issue with your environment. For example, on my Fedora 41 setup Ghostty starts up pretty much instantly regardless of the value of this option.

skerit 2y ago

This is very nice! How do I work around remote SSH shells complaining like `Error opening terminal: xterm-ghostty`?

mikergray 2y ago
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh
SG- 2y ago
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

gregwebs 2y ago

Warp has been meeting all my needs other than tab switching behavior. It's not open source but the UX is great. Switched from WezTerm which was working cross platform but not quite as good. Both are low latency and written in Rust.

howon92 2y ago

To people who tried using it, what are the reasons to use it over iTerm2?

jitl 2y ago
It’s fast. In the same league as Alacritty and Wezterm, which is to say on the doom fire benchmark those terminals can do 500fps plus, where iTerm2 does 90fps on my M4 MacBook Pro. In practical terms if you use tmux or vim in the terminal, it makes a big difference for typing latency and scrolling.
- howon92 2y ago
  Thank you! Interesting, because I haven't perceived "terminal performance" as a problem before. I will try it out
- quantonganh 2y ago
  Where should I look first if I only get around 160 fps, while WezTerm gets 400+ fps?
- dschuessler 2y ago
  The parent is probably referring to this benchmark: https://github.com/const-void/DOOM-fire-zig/ https://github.com/const-void/DOOM-fire-zig/
Jcampuzano2 2y ago
I tried it but I just can't jump since it doesn't have support the global hotkey to autofocus iterm that I'm so used to. I tried using their toggle_visibility keybind but it's a bit wonky since it doesn't return focus back to another window when you toggle away.
- kaycey2022 2y ago
  I just use rcmd for that. But that iterm feature is nice.
2y ago

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

Could GPT5 or Claude written this from scratch?

throwaway0665 2y ago
of course not
loeg 2y ago
In the same sense that a million monkeys on typewriters could theoretically produce Shakespeare.

micahkepe 2y ago

Been trying it out for a few hours and love it! One feature that I do miss from Kitty is the cursor trail when your cursor moves in a buffer. Excited to see what Ghostty does in the future and thank you for a great new terminal!

petepete 2y ago
Cursor trail? I've been using Kitty since just about the beginning and didn't know it did that! Edit. Oh I see it's a really recent addition. I'll definitely be taking that for a spin.

makapuf 2y ago

Just want to share what I just realised, but the author is no one else than the mitchell hashimoto from hashicorp, so not exactly a newbie ! Would it have killed you to let us poor 99% have a bit of fun releasing useful projects too? (And also reach a bit of your determination, skill and talent)? (no, really, kudos, well done and thanks)

MyKiwi 2y ago

any tips on how to install it if you have nix (without nixos)?

Cyph0n 2y ago
You can install it as a Flake using plain Nix. See: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary#nix-flake https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary#nix-flake
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  nixGL is also likely required on non-NixOS Linux distros. https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL

puttycat 2y ago

What am I missing? Can someone please explain what reason there is to switch/build a new terminal when we can use e.g. iTerm ?

x3ro 2y ago
Proper text-based configuration made me switch from iTerm to WezTerm, and i’ll give this a try as well :)
chipsrafferty 2y ago
Yeah or vscode integrated bash?
- TranquilMarmot 2y ago
  This is what I use for everything and it works great. Coworkers look at me crazy when I tell them I never open a dedicated terminal.
nathansherburn 2y ago
I'm still using the built in MacOS terminal. What am I missing? I mostly do webdev - maybe terminal features are more important for other types of programming?
- dcre 2y ago
  Built-in terminal doesn’t support truecolor. Many CLI programs rely on that to look good.
  - herpdyderp 2y ago
    What CLI programs? I have yet to run into any issues after using the built in terminal for its entire lifespan.
    - oefrha 2y ago
      You wouldn’t realize because 24-bit colors are silently dropped. You don’t get the full experience but you also won’t “run into any issues”, unless you start using something that relies on 24-bit color coding for core functionality, like my own log viewer.

nickorlow 2y ago

Any Alacritry users have opinions on this? I've been waiting for its release and am looking forward to trying it. Wonder what the big differences are? I mostly appreciate Alacritty's simplicity and use tmux to manage multiple windows/panes.

wonger_ 2y ago
In my experience, Alacritty had a few bugs / unimplemented features that broke certain TUIs. Ghostty seems to be the most complete / least broken terminal emulator.
jitl 2y ago
You should also check out Wezterm too and see which one you like more. I ported my tmux keybinds to Wezterm - including vim-tmux-navigator style ctrl+{h,j,k,l} for navigating between nvim splits and Wezterm splits, ctrl-a as tmux leader. Getting tmux out of the way between terminal and nvim noticably improved scroll feeling in nvim and just in shell scrollback too. I styled Wezterm's tabs to look just like my tmux tab bar too, there's no visual difference for me between a Wezterm window with Wezterm tabs, and a Wezterm window with tmux tabs. If you're more of a terminal native than a Mac native, I think you'd enjoy it. My wezterm config: https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/new/config/wezterm/wezterm.lua https://github.com/justjake/Dotfiles/blob/new/config/wezterm...
- nickorlow 2y ago
  Does wezterm (or any other terminal emulator) have some way to attach to a session over ssh or over multiple ttys? It's the main thing stopping me from jumping ship.
  - jitl 2y ago
    Yes, Wezterm has this. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html I haven’t used it yet, and it requires you install Wezterm on the remote. Ideally Wezterm could push a mux server executable to the remote host if needed.

metaltyphoon 2y ago

Why is the CLI args so weird with the + sign?

slantedview 2y ago

Congrats on the release! I'm excited to try this out.

elashri 2y ago

I have been waiting to try this out for sometime now. I recently tried various terminal emulator tools and I settled on wave terminal. This is a list of these tools for reference. I would list tools that are on both MacOS and Linux which is comparable to this new emulator. But also because I did not try any on windows. - Alacritty (https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty) - waveterminal (https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm) - Hyber (https://github.com/zeit/hyper https://github.com/zeit/hyper) - Kitty (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty) - Rio (https://github.com/raphamorim/rio https://github.com/raphamorim/rio) - Tabby (https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby https://github.com/Eugeny/tabby) - Wezterm(https://github.com/wez/wezterm https://github.com/wez/wezterm) - Contour (https://contour-terminal.org https://contour-terminal.org) - Extraterm (https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm) - Warp (https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/) I didn't like that Warp is VC product as I don't like essential tool like a terminal in my workflow to be dependent on proprietary VC product.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

xbeta 2y ago

Great stuff! Does it have a Session/Workspace concept? Maybe we can learn from how Alacritty does it integrating with tmux?

cornel007 2y ago

Congrats! I’m curious what the main reason is you ended up going with the MIT license over GPL. Is it because of potentially integrating Ghostty with VS Code like you mentioned during Zig showtime a year ago?

needlesslygrim 2y ago
I'm also interested in why the MIT license was chosen. I guess it's because of the plan to create 'libghostty'?

Zetaphor 2y ago

Sadly another terminal that doesn't seem to support "Quake style" dropdown (that I can find) Having my terminal session available on a hotkey has become a critical part of my workflow

SG- 2y ago
except it does? View -> Quick Terminal.
- Zetaphor 2y ago
  I've built from source on Linux, I don't use MacOS.
  - Zetaphor 2y ago
    This just doesn't seem to work :( quick-terminal-position=top quick-terminal-screen=main quick-terminal-autohide=false keybind=f9=toggle_quick_terminal Edit: Joined the discord, turns out this feature is MacOS only :/
  - gpanders 2y ago
    It's a macOS-only feature, for now.
tristan957 2y ago
GTK does not support the Wayland protocol to implement a Quake style terminal.
IceDane 2y ago
I think this being part of the terminal is sort of weird. I've had this functionality in my window managers for years. First xmonad, now awesomewm. It's called scratch pads.

PMunch 2y ago

Cool to finally see a 1.0 release of Ghostty! Will definitely check it out. One very strange and niche question though, do you support font switching with SGR escape codes? After the Monaspace font family was released I made a PR to Vim to support highlighting by font switching, but I've yet to find a terminal emulator to my liking that supports it. I'm building an eink laptop and its monochrome display requires some neat tricks like this to get the most out of the device.

hysan 2y ago

I might give this a shot but using GTK4 makes me think this won’t live up to the “native” claim on Linux. It will likely feel out of place on non-GTK DEs with KDE being the big one. And yes, I did read the about page disclaimer about Linux but strongly disagree about calling GTK4 the closest thing. That’s a very GNOME-centric view (e.g., ignores the rest of the Linux ecosystem) and makes me worry that any issues on other DEs will be ignored/deprioritized. It’s possible that I’m wrong and that a sizable population of the closed beta Linux users we’re on KDE, but without knowing, I’m very hesitant and put back by the “native” claim (it feels disingenuous).

happens 2y ago
Does "native" exist on Linux, in your opinion? Feels to me like both QT and GTK (and maybe iced if cosmic comes to fruition?) could be considered native (or none of them can, depending on your point of view).
- hysan 2y ago
  I’d answer this differently depending on when you ask. 10 years ago (random, but long enough number) I would have said an easy yes. Both GTK and QT would have been acceptable toolkits to use as the cross DE issues weren’t that many and bugs got fixed. Ask me a few years ago and I’d waver. It wasn’t clear how ecosystem friendly GTK4 would be, so I might have optimistically replied the same. But caveat it with a “maybe support both X11 and Wayland.” But ask me now and I’d say to earn the label *Linux native*, you would have to support a lot. GTK4 has proven to not play well with other DEs. The jump to Wayland has caused a fairly significant split in DEs (this year has greatly closed the gap with many showing great progress in supporting Wayland) which means some apps may not work on your DE of choice. And overall, I’d be hesitant to claim that any app is truly *Linux native* because installing an app no longer guarantees that it’ll just work and look and feel right. You’d need to have builds GTK4 & QT, and make sure that they work in both X11 and Wayland for the next few years. When I look for apps nowadays, I tend to append my DE and/or distribution to my search. I currently think it’s more truthful (on Linux) to say that an app is native to a DE instead of to Linux. Note: I don’t think GTK4 is bad. One of the best parts of the Linux ecosystem is that we have a lot of great DEs that have gradually differentiated themselves by UX. GTK4 not playing well with others is in part due to how different GNOME’s UX is. The toolkit is meant to serve one DE paradigm now and that’s led to higher quality on that DE. The drawback to that diversification is that there is no easy way to support all DEs. Your toolkit drives what you support (unless you go out of your way to fix things that GTK4 isn’t fixing - which is why I put that bit about seeing how KDE issues would be addressed). The word “Linux”, now more than ever before, describes an ecosystem (or kernel) rather than an operating system.

navigate8310 2y ago

Any love for Windows. I'm getting restless to ditch putty but unable to find any good emulator that has select and login style of management screen.

karmakaze 2y ago
> Windows support is planned after the 1.0 release. This really does aim to be the terminal for all.
metaltyphoon 2y ago
When on windows I have been happy with WezTerm
baaym 2y ago
Apparently it works great on WSL See this other user's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518033
- 38 2y ago
  For the 10th time WSL is not windows, it's a Linux emulator.
ComputerGuru 2y ago
I ditched putty a long time ago. Conemu is better than putty these days (latest Windows 10 or Windows 11 if you’re unlucky enough). I don’t like the “feel” of the new Windows Terminal “app” but it is more “modern” and “capable” (running a newer conhost under the hood). But if you’re willing to use non-standard software then WezTerm, Alacritty, and Kitty (WSL with an XServer) are all good options.
ckrailo 2y ago
I've been happy enough with Microsoft Terminal instead of PuTTY (and I appreciate the open source github repo). If you're comfortable with editing JSON files, you can save the SSH connections as profiles so you can click to open a new tab to whatever SSH session (or WSL setup, or Powershell setup) you want. Example: https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-custom-ssh-profiles-in-windows-terminal/ https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-custom-ssh-pr...

emmelaich 2y ago

Already in homebrew if you want to use that! I'm very new to Ghostty and went looking for my favorite theme "Solarized Light"; it's listed as "iTerm2 Solarized Light" -- in contrast (heh) to "Solarized Dark"

CraigJPerry 2y ago
Thanks for this lead - i eventually figured out there's 7 options: $ ghostty +list-themes /solari <... lists 7 options ...> And then in the ghostty config i could: theme = dark:Builtin Solarized Dark,light:Builtin Solarized Light

RainyDayTmrw 2y ago

As someone who uses the default terminal app, I'm curious to learn about other people's use-cases where the choice of terminal app makes a difference and how.

naikrovek 2y ago
I am not sure how to answer this. Why choose a non-default anything? It feels like deeper down, you’re asking why anyone chooses anything. These terminal emulators all behave slightly differently and have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are configurable. Some are programmable. Some feel “right”. Others can be made to feel “right”. Etc. Why use any non-default application? Same answer for terminal emulators.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  This is a very specific question.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > These terminal emulators all behave slightly differently That's the point. Different browsers or word processors behave completely differently. They were asking what differences there are between this and other TEs.
robinsonrc 2y ago
Lack of true colour support was the first thing that got me looking at other options
- matwood 2y ago
  This. I try to stick with the built ins, but lack of true color on Terminal.app is annoying. I wouldn't consider myself an advanced terminal person, but I do all my git interactions using the terminal and like it to look nice.
m1keil 2y ago
I really like to copy on select in the terminal. Terminal.app used to have a hack available to add this feature in, but since SIP days, it is no longer possible.

cranberryturkey 2y ago

no windows version?

pzo 2y ago

Landing page and github README could improve: - picture or gif is worth a thousand word - it mentioned its cross-platform but I don't see support for Windows or Android - its better make it explicit it's only for macOS and Linux. Yesterday was looking for some nicer terminal on Android and was hoping ghostty could work. - I like simple landing pages but this... is too simple and not much useful (only 2 buttons and ASCII image. Why even bother with such landing page and not just stick with github README? - it doesn't provide me any fast information how to compares to different terminals and why I should switch from Warp

grantcarthew 2y ago
I disagree, the landing page is just fantastic. I like the product as well, however, I need to use it for a week to comment.
- punkspider 2y ago
  I think it would help if there were more information about it, along with demos, to clearly communicate what it's about. At the moment I'm still confused because I see Ghostty has gotten so much attention, and I'm not clear why it's special. I am sold thanks to the author's authenticity, but if I had not seen this, I wouldn't know what I'm looking at. So I think it would be very helpful if there were more info on the landing page.
  - srik 2y ago
    Performance of course but native is a big part of ghostty’s appeal; there’s an article by a neovim dev that expands on that native part a bit - https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/ https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/
- tapirl 2y ago
  I have to enable JavaScript to make it load. It seems the animation on the page requires JavaScript. So, I agree with @pzo that a GIF would be better in this case.
2y ago

tsrez 2y ago

This is such a cool project, looks amazing!

kaycey2022 2y ago

I love the terminal. But I'm seeing relatively high CPU usage. Maybe there's some non default setting that can reduce that?

AndyKelley 2y ago
Are you perhaps hitting this KDE bug? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497341 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497341
- kaycey2022 2y ago
  I'm on macos

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

casey2 2y ago

It's pretty slow and buggy for me idk

iambvk 2y ago

Does this support the non-standard key-press, key-release, etc. events proposal by kitty project? They are necessary for nicer terminal UI projects.

mitchellh 2y ago
Yes.
- iambvk 2y ago
  Cool. Thanks.

dr_kretyn 2y ago

[flagged]

lawgimenez 2y ago
The description is in the documentation. What’s the trouble by clicking on it? It won’t take a second.
- dr_kretyn 2y ago
  I don't know whether it's going to take a second or half a minute. I also don't know whether there will be an answer on the first page, or there's going to be a cute image and then I'll need to find "Getting Started" to learn how to get started with unknown project. My subjective experience on the internet is that if the gate isn't labelled, there's unlikely value on the other side.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    People who are interested in this are talking about it because they're interested in it. Nobody is trying to convert you.
    - abenga 2y ago
      People who are interested in things learn about them at different times. You make it seem like it's "learn about it at the outset or gtfo".
      - halostatue 2y ago
        And it might be that next month there's a different homepage with more details. For a launch where all "marketing" has been via blog post, discord, and discussions across various nerdy social media sites…I'm more than happy for them to have some fun to celebrate this. There are people who have been watching this for a few months waiting for it to go 1.0 — and, at least on day 1, "if you know, you know."
  - 2y ago

HeliumHydride 2y ago

Will the eventual windows release support GPU shaders like Windows terminal does?

johan914 2y ago

The default macOS terminal app has CMD UP/DOWN to move to previous prompts. This is one of my pet peeves about terminal apps, they seem to lack this command?

slater 2y ago
Not even cmd up/down, just hit up/down key, no cmd needed
- johan914 2y ago
  There's a difference between moving the window and inserting text.
  - slater 2y ago
    Oh i thought you meant "go through previously-entered commands"
m1keil 2y ago
Ghostty supports it (like many other terminals) - it is called shell integration and it is supposed to be enabled by default, just like in Terminal.app.
rererereferred 2y ago
It works for me with cmd+shift+up/down. I had it set up with the iterm2 shell integration and it just worked.
- djpowers 2y ago
  Just for reference, it looks like it's also bound to cmd + up/down (without shift). Documented as "jump_to_prompt" here: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#jump_to_prompt https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#jump_to_pr...

uncomplexity_ 2y ago

anyone know if this can be plugged into vscode to replace xtermjs?

pfg_ 2y ago
no. it's planned for the future to make a libghostty that is embeddable, and it would be up to someone to make a modification for vscode to do that (not sure if it can be done with vscode's extension api)
- tristan957 2y ago
  VSCode would switch from xterm.js to a libghostty WASM build.

cryptozeus 2y ago

You can downvote this but Why they never put a single screen shots !

dchest 2y ago
The whole home page is a screenshot and two buttons.
- mkl 2y ago
  But not showing any of the native interface elements that are supposed to set this terminal emulator apart.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    The home page is obviously going for 'quirky', but it's mad that it doesn't even say "...is a terminal emulator" anywhere. At first, I thought Ghostty was an ASCII animation library! I guess the name's suffix should've clued me in, but that's easy to overlook in a hurry.
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      Somebody please read this! I thought it was some goofy JavaScript demo or something. It wasn’t until I clicked on the download link that I realized it was something else entirely. I was thinking “why does this ghost JavaScript demo thing have a download link?” and I expected it to go to some GitHub page or something The homepage is cool but on mobile it isn’t at all obvious this is software, let alone a terminal emulator. If this HN post didn’t already have like 1000 votes I probably wouldn’t have even bothered with testing the link. I would have said “cool ghost” and moved on with my day. That being said, I am looking forward to trying this as an iterm2 replacement. Iterm2 has been my default terminal on Mac since forever… it was probably the first hit for “putty for mac” or something, and I probably installed it and never even considered trying something else. It’s always “just worked”.

sss111 2y ago

Is it mining cryto? Caused my mac to slow down, CPU usage shot up to 100%, and it dropped right down after I quit it.

exabyte 2y ago

Genuinely excited to see this land! Can't wait to try it out. This could be the last piece of the puzzle to a nearly flawless terminal experience

unit149 2y ago

> support native GUIs for configuration in line with our native UI philosophy As a terminal emulator, running and building it from source in Wayland as a passive process that exists in the shell, while being a method of input-output system call management.

daft_pink 2y ago

Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever.

turnsout 2y ago

I ran into some funkiness once I ssh’d into a FreeBSD box. The shell history was wonky, and goaccess wouldn’t launch at all, complaining about the terminal environment, which I’ve never seen. With that said, this looks like an awesome project and I’ll be following it closely!

matrixhelix 2y ago
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh

codetrotter 2y ago

When I try to ssh into one of my servers using this terminal I get the following: missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty Connection to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx closed. (IP address removed by me.) It turned out that this is associated with how I automatically run tmux by having the following kind of config for how I connect to that server. Host server3000 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/host_specific/foo/bar/server3000/id_ed25519_baz RequestTTY yes RemoteCommand /usr/bin/env tmux new-session -A -s '%L' Whereas if I outcomment the RemoteCommand setting in my ~/.ssh/config of the laptop I'm connecting form, I can connect fine even using Ghostty as my terminal and from env | grep ^TERM= I get output TERM=xterm-256color in the initial normal shell. And if I run tmux, then inside of it from env | grep ^TERM= I get output TERM=tmux-256color So there seems to be some termcap stuff I'd have to figure out if I want to use Ghostty and still be able to run tmux automatically in the way I'm currently doing without problem when using the Terminal that ships with macOS and ssh'ing into my servers.

matrixhelix 2y ago
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo
- codetrotter 2y ago
  Thank you. I’ll probably go with sticking their suggestion into my ssh client config SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color mentioned in the end of your link. I’ll put it next to the line where I set RemoteCommand and include a comment for myself that this SetEnv is for being able to still use RemoteCommand tmux thing even when using Ghostty.

eviks 2y ago

Since this has some plans for being the best, will it add the great unique feature of wezterm: scripting config support?

Kylejeong21 2y ago

this is way better than using warp (ai gen terminal). i'd rather use a nice-looking and well designed (UX) terminal than have to use a clunky ai native one.

LambdaComplex 2y ago
Warp has been around since 2020, i.e. since before the generative AI craze took off. Every HN thread about it that I've seen has been full of comments that boil down to "this seems cool but I refuse to use a terminal emulator that's full of telemetry and requires sign-in." And of course the VC-funded terminal emulator has AI shoehorned in now. I shouldn't be so surprised. tldr: you're setting a low bar

terminaltrove 2y ago

We've added Ghostty to the terminals section of Terminal Trove for comparison. https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ghostty/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ghostty/ You can find all terminals for comparison below and also the list of terminals (including Ghostty) https://terminaltrove.com/compare/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/compare/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/ https://terminaltrove.com/terminals/

deleted 2y ago
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meitham 2y ago
The one feature I clicked for is RtL languages support, could that be added to your comparison table please
- terminaltrove 2y ago
  We will add this to the table, is there a quick test to check if a terminal has RtL / bidirectional language support? If there are any other features you look for in a terminal not on the comparison table please let us know!
  - meitham 2y ago
    Thanks! Another important factor I find is weather the configurations is file based or menu based.
kseistrup 2y ago
How come TT's categories aren't listed alphabetically?
- terminaltrove 2y ago
  Do you mean here? https://terminaltrove.com/categories/ https://terminaltrove.com/categories/ (1) Or any other category on the page? (2) We can change (1) alphabetically if that is what you mean.

cakealert 2y ago

Should of used QT. > error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop was not provided by any .service files

tristan957 2y ago
You would have the same problem with Qt. You don't have the xdg-desktop-portal and an associated backend running. If you're going to build your own Linux system, you should be aware of why something is broken before making a complaint to the wrong people. In this case, you misconfigured your own system.
- cakealert 2y ago
  Odd how a hundred other applications have no issues whatsoever then. This Portal is something from flatpak btw, no other terminal depends on it. This is likely some cancer from GTK that metastasized, anything using GTK has to lock it down tight to rely on the absolute minimum of "features".
  - tristan957 2y ago
    Then don't use it.
SSLy 2y ago
Should have used a grammar checker.

bonniesimon 2y ago

I've tried it out and I can notice that ghostty is a little more snappy than Alacritty. I was happy with Alacritty, but I used a face a weird issue where the whole terminal freezes. I'm not sure if this is a Alacritty issue or tmux issue. I can only confirm this by using Ghostty and checking if the same issue happens. Anyways this is a great piece of software. I've never been this hyped for a software ever before. Great work team.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

favadi 2y ago

For some reasons, the font looks thinner compare to Kitty on macOS. Not sure if it is a bug or intentional.

theanirudh 2y ago
Yes, it is. Try setting font-thicken = true https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#font-thicken https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#font-thicken
- favadi 2y ago
  Thanks, that's exactly what I am used to!

danielmartins 2y ago

Looks awesome, amazing work! Any particular/strong reason for choosing Zig for this?

yla92 2y ago
Check "Why Zig" slide from this talk https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-pattern...
- danielmartins 2y ago
  Thanks!

paoda 2y ago

I've been in the beta for quite a while, the only issues I had were resolved quite quickly. I never got to contribute that much in feedback since I honestly never had anything to complain about, outside of not being able to also use ghostty on Windows (lol). Congrats on 1.0! It's been a joy to use I wish everyone can enjoy this wonderful piece of software as much as I have!

microflash 2y ago

Have set it up with Nushell. It’s pretty fast while displaying really long log files. Going to sit alongside iTerm2 until I get comfortable with it. The only things I miss are (1) right click to copy paste selection (akin to Putty), and (2) profiles (I work with different shells depending on my projects and use Profiles frequently on iTerm2)

arnath 2y ago

I dunno if this was obvious to everyone but OP is one of the founders of Hashicorp

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

l0b0 2y ago

nixpkgs PR: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/368404 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/368404

teroshan 2y ago
Corresponding Nixpkgs-Tracker link, to track if it's merged into your branches of interest: https://nixpkgs-tracker.ocfox.me/?pr=368404 https://nixpkgs-tracker.ocfox.me/?pr=368404

iammrpayments 2y ago

I tried and it looks really nice, best christmas gift this year

yakshaving_jgt 2y ago

Looks nice, but the Quick Terminal isn't instant, so I'll stick with iTerm2. iTerm2 isn't instant either, but they feel about the same[0], although with iTerm2 the full screen Quake-mode (Quick Terminal equivalent) hides the MacOS menu bar, and Ghostty doesn't. For my taste, I want a full screen terminal, with no menu bar, no delay, and no animations, which I can toggle with a global hotkey. [0]: Actually, scratch that. I tested again, and iTerm2 opens more quickly.

lifeinthevoid 2y ago

This product just breathes craftsmanship and love. Respect and thank you!

tntxtnt 2y ago

> Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator Doesn't have a binary for Windows so it's not "cross-platform" yet.

isametry 2y ago
The minimum number of platforms for “cross-platform” software is by definition two (2).

sspiff 2y ago

Does this have sixel support?

matrixhelix 2y ago
No, and there are no plans to support it from the core developers. However, if there’s a PR, they might consider it. It supports Kitty Image Protocol

jwr 2y ago

It's the first terminal app that made me switch from Terminal.app on my Mac. It gets basically everything right, and doesn't try to have every feature. Fantastic work, thank you!

Alifatisk 2y ago

I couldn't find any screenshots, also, why is this being hyped so much? What have I missed?

d3m0t3p 2y ago
Just try it. I tried and the launch was so smooth that I'm keeping it a few days to test it. My current biggest problem is that I launch my terminal using the spotlight shortcut (⌘-space on mac) and while iterm2 is found when I search for term, ghostty isn't.
- metaltyphoon 2y ago
  It took a minute for me, but it did find it. Something is off with macOS indexing. Any app that you install via brew takes a bit to show up.
  - d3m0t3p 2y ago
    I'm not complaining about the indexing (you can start the indexing by starting spotlight on and off). I'm complaining about having to search for "ghos..." instead of "term...". Because I don't don't like to remember the specific app name. But this complaint is the same for everything; when searching for Excel, I would like "Numbers" to also show up in the results. When looking for vscode I would like "Visual Studio code" to also show up, but I need to type either code, visual or studio.
    - rererereferred 2y ago
      Sounds like a feature request for spotlight to add aliases or tags. Personally I always keep a terminal open.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      Huh, you've got me curious, and the Windows start menu does in fact launch Visual Studio Code when searching for "vscode." Color me pleasantly surprised!

noisy_boy 2y ago

Compiled ok but crashed upon execution: info: ghostty version=1.0.1-main+a8e5eef1 info: ghostty build optimize=ReleaseFast info: runtime=apprt.Runtime.gtk info: font_backend=font.main.Backend.fontconfig_freetype info: dependency harfbuzz=8.4.0 info: dependency fontconfig=21402 info: renderer=renderer.OpenGL info: libxev backend=main.Backend.io_uring info(os): setlocale from env result=en_US.utf8 info(gtk): GTK version build=4.6.9 runtime=4.6.9 info: optional config file not found, not loading path=/home/xxxx/.config/ghostty/config info(config): default shell source=env value=/usr/bin/bash "vulkan-disable" is only available when building GTK with G_ENABLE_DEBUG. See GDK_DEBUG=help info(gtk): libadwaita version build=1.1.7 runtime=1.1.7 (process:164888): Adwaita-WARNING **: 19:33:13.357: Using GtkSettings:gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme with libadwaita is unsupported. Please use AdwStyleManager:color-scheme instead. error(gtk): unable to get current color scheme: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such method “ReadOne” info(grid): loaded OpenGL 3.2 warning(grid): OpenGL version is too old. Ghostty requires OpenGL 3.3 error(gtk_surface): surface failed to realize: error.OpenGLOutdated info(sentry): sentry envelope does not contain crash, discarding System: OS: Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64 Host: 20QVCTO1WW ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Kernel: 6.9.3-76060903-generic Uptime: 2 hours, 20 mins Packages: 5314 (dpkg), 22 (flatpak) Shell: bash 5.1.16 Resolution: 3840x2160 DE: Plasma 5.25.5 WM: KWin WM Theme: Breeze Theme: [Plasma], Adwaita-dark [GTK2/3] Icons: Papirus-Dark [Plasma], Papirus-Dark [GTK2/3] Terminal: konsole Terminal Font: JetBrains Mono 11 CPU: Intel i7-9750H (12) @ 4.500GHz GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q GPU: Intel CoffeeLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] Memory: 6307MiB / 31738MiB

tylersmith 2y ago
You have OpenGL 3.2 but need 3.3
- nacs 2y ago
  Error is a little misleading. OpenGL is likely much higher than 3.3 since op is using nvidia gpu. Problem is that this application uses OpenGL ES for which 3.3 was only recently even finalized as a standard and most GPUs like nvidia don’t support.

tuananh 2y ago

- xterm still feel faster to me. - some visual artifacts with the gtk menu - sometimes prompt got clear when openning 2nd / 3rd windows - cant get keybinding quick toggle to work

manmal 2y ago
In case you mean the quick terminal (ctrl+`): keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal
- tuananh 2y ago
  doesn't work for me. i'm using i3. olps, it's macOS only feature.
l-p 2y ago
> - some visual artifacts with the gtk menu You need a compositor. picom works. For a proper "native i3 experience" I recommend setting gtk-titlebar=false and unbinding tab/pane management keybinds. I already have a window manager, I don't need a second one. I also had to disable adwaita because when it's enabled closing a shell with ^D closes all open windows, sometimes it leaves an empty window instead. > - xterm still feel faster to me. lxterminal also launches 6 times faster, I guess on a slow laptop without a dedicated GPU these terminals are not the most efficient option.
- tuananh 2y ago
  there's a black box after i click the burger menu button.

tecleandor 2y ago

I've been using Alacritty so I can switch back and forth from my work's Mac to my own Linux, and share the config, but I'm testing Ghostty and I'm really liking it. And no silly closed AI somethingsomething integration.

Emigre_ 2y ago

I'm excited about the fact that this is written in Zig. I'm a Kitty user at the moment, but if this delivers I'll change to Ghostty.

christophilus 2y ago

I use Foot as my terminal and Niri as my WM. It’s a great combo. Niri handles splits for me, and I don’t need tabs. I also turn off all window decorations, so my terminal content gets 100% of the terminal’s screen real estate-- so I don't need a native UI. All that said, it looks like Ghosty can be configured to match this setup, so I’ll give it a try. I just wanted to mention Foot to anyone who is running Linux. Foot is a simple, focused project.

conaclos 2y ago
I am a happy foot user and I am considering switching from Sway to Niri. What has been your experience with Niri? One thing that concerns me about Niri is that it is not wlroots based. This means that many tools I accustomed to don't work with Niri. Do you have some dedicated tools for screen sharing, screen recording, screen printing, multi-monitor management, ...?
- christophilus 2y ago
  I absolutely love Niri. It has a built-in screen capture which is good enough for me. Screensharing works fine from Firefox (which is where I do all of my video conferencing). I stopped using multiple screens a long time ago, but I do occasionally hook my laptop up to my TV, and that works out of the box. Though, for stuff like that, I might log into to a Gnome + PaperWM session simply because I don’t remember how to fiddle with things, and I’m not generally trying to optimize for my workflow when I’m giving a live talk or watching TV.
ramon156 2y ago
Is it weird that I never considered foot because of the name? At least when you say "alacritty" i understand that it's a terminal. When I tell someone I use "foot"... I don't know, it doesn't give a good feeling.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  What about when you tell someone you "cat" a file or use "sudo"? Who cares what normies think?

diimdeep 2y ago

Nice addition. Slightly more CPU heavy than Kitty. in MacOS yabai tiling manager has problems dealing with native tabs, that's gonna annoy me like with Finder. also in MacOS try pressing "Cmd + Shift + \", also works in Finder, it's there, it's cool, but I never use it.

rererereferred 2y ago
That's neat but how do I select a panel afterwards? Arrow keys do nothing and hjkl start a search.
- crabique 2y ago
  On my system it's ctrl+tab to cycle through tabs, then escape to open the one that is currently highlighted.

rauanm 2y ago

I tried to install and play around with it, it's really nice. Took a bit of tinkering to set a theme and my favourite Pragmata Pro, but what ultimately annoys me is the lack of 'turnkey' selecting for text. When I run `Cmd + A`, I want my terminal to make a full text selection of an entered command, not of the screen content. Or when I run `Option + Shift + Arrow left/right`, I want to select words from an entered command, not to type '4D;4C;4D;4C'. I'm not a vimer or emacser, I want to have normal macos experience. For this reason alone I thought it's too early to switch and Warp is still great for me.

rauanm 2y ago
But `ghostty +list-themes` is damn impressive.
vrnvu 2y ago
Cmd+A to select the entered command isn't standard. You could try: - Ctrl+A: Move to the beginning of the line. - Ctrl+E: Move to the end of the line. - Ctrl+K: Cut the command from the cursor position to the end. - Ctrl+U: Cut the command from the cursor to the beginning of the line. - Ctrl+Y: Paste the text back. This should work in all terminals.
- rauanm 2y ago
  You're just forcing me to be a vimer at this point. :) By normal macos experience I mean key bindings for regular text fields, not regular terminal (whatever they're supposed to be). Afaik, Warp was the first one ever to treat terminal input as a regular text field input.
- metaltyphoon 2y ago
  Ctrl+W: delete last word
eviks 2y ago
Good ideas (and possible in Wezterm if shell marks the semantic zones, not sure whether possible if not), though not really a normal macos experience given mac's default terminal doesn't select of an entered command on Cmd+A

jFriedensreich 2y ago

Am I the only person wondering why we need 100 terminal emulators when there are only 2 or 3 solutions to using command line tools more like a REPL? (to some degree warp, some bash support in hydrogen, advanced edit mode of powershell) I don't care for using "fancy" TUIs all i want is better tooling to interact with these that does not feel like 1970 and more like the chrome console.

__float 2y ago
> I saw tradeoffs that I didn't like. I saw features that I wanted. I saw performance that I could improve. I saw stagnation. There are many fantastic terminals out there and you should use them if they work for you. But I wanted something different and thought maybe others did too. This motivation is pretty clearly stated in the article. Some people use "fancy TUIs" (the famous editors vim and emacs surely count) and if you don't, feel free to ignore this new option.
- CarlitosHighway 2y ago
  Unfortunately, launching a fancy TUI like lazydocker inside a fresh install of Ghostty will make the TUI exit with an error, when the same TUI runs just fine on iTerm, alacritty, etc.

styfle 2y ago

Congratulations! I was hoping 1.0 would mean CMD+F search would work, but looks like that was pushed back to a later release unfortunately. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomment-2558909414 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomme...

rharb 2y ago

Congratulations on making it to the launch! I really appreciate the levelheadedness of your responses regarding Ghostty, and how clear you are to be speaking positively for your thing instead of negatively about anyone else's. Going to build it at lunch today and give it a shot :)

linsomniac 2y ago

Does Ghostty support TiteInhibit? The docs say "if xterm does something we should do it", but I don't see any mention of "tite".

rplnt 2y ago

Is there a way to restore session (windows, tabs, paths) after (application) start? How is this not default everywhere is beyond me (looking at Firefox). But my main point here would be that the lack of explorable configuration, and the docs not having any search, make it quite challenging search for this.

pacifika 2y ago
Are you saying Firefox doesn’t restore state?

Gormo 2y ago

Looks interesting. I'm playing around with it on Linux (with Xfce), but can't figure out how to get rid of the CSD header bar / hamburger menu and use a normal menu bar instead. I see Mac screenshots with a normal Mac-style menu bar, but I don't see how to enable the equivalent on Linux. The `window-theme` and `window-decoration` options do not seem to do anything.

tux1968 2y ago
They should work if you exit and restart ghostty.
- Gormo 2y ago
  Thanks, that worked. Apparently, the reload-config hotkey doesn't always work for certain changes. In this case, setting `gtk-titlebar = false` disabled the header bar -- only issue now is that there is no menu bar at all!

pilgrim0 2y ago

I would love to try but it doesn’t support Monterey

rplnt 2y ago

> Split Right | Split Down Thanks for this. After 7 years of using iterm2 I still don't know what will happen with the ambiguous "Split Horizontally | Split Vertically". I know the issue is I'm thinking about it and should just learn it, but it would be more helpful if it was named "Split A | Split B". (might be a non-native language problem)

robertlutece 2y ago
I think it ambiguous. vim has vsplit ("Like |:split|, but split vertically.") that is "split right", however, wezterm has "Split Vertically (Top/Bottom). Split the current pane vertically into two panes, by spawning the default program into the bottom half"
dcre 2y ago
I’m a native English speaker and I also have trouble with this. When the panes are arranged horizontally, the line dividing them is vertical.

stainablesteel 2y ago

looks really cool! i'm gonna play with it, thanks for this awesome project

quantonganh 2y ago

You mentioned that Ghostty gets around 500 FPS, but I tested it myself and only got 160 FPS on M1 Pro (WezTerm gets 400 FPS). What can be the reason?

dabdab44 2y ago

text is missing left padding on macOS otherwise nice

poetril 2y ago
There is a config setting for this “window-padding-x” I believe.

xtat 2y ago

My takeaway is that it's mostly useful for apple stuff-- why would "platform native" matter on Linux?

ur-whale 2y ago
You should try it. I'm on Linux, and first impression is ghostty is really good. Speed in particular is impressive.

aleden 2y ago

I went to ghostty.org and spent a long time staring at that animated ghost, and thought of clippy. Except this guy seems to have wider range of emotions. Anyways, I eventually learned this was about a terminal emulator (which is awesome), but the ghost on the front page really inspired my imagination. I think it would be a good thing to have some kind of companion like that, when it's me, by myself, constantly surrounded by terminals all day. Is the choice of having the ghost be rendered in a text-mode terminal important? I think it is for me.

codedokode 2y ago

I have a traumatic experience with GPU-based GUI. Long time ago I tried to run Ubuntu in a VM, and they switched to GPU-based rendering. But as VM doesn't have a GPU, the system fell back to something called "llvmpipe". The result was that the widgets reacted approximately with 30 second lag to every action. So what I am asking, if you are making a GPU-based rendering toolkit, please write also SIMD software fallback without shaders. Remember how fast Windows 95 was and make it a little bit faster.

pvillano 2y ago
I am asking this in good faith Why would you not ssh?
- codedokode 2y ago
  Because I wanted to see how a new Ubuntu looked. Not to do something useful.
- codedokode 2y ago
  Also to SSH into a VM you need to setup a second network card and to do this you need at least log into a text console.

yourapostasy 2y ago

Neat, this [1] looks like the project uses vttest [2] to test DEC VT terminal compatibility? [1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md [2] https://invisible-island.net/vttest/ https://invisible-island.net/vttest/

CSDude 2y ago

I wanted something as fast as Alacritty that had native tabs, could divide horizontal/vertical without tmux. And this seems like it!

lopkeny12ko 2y ago

To be honest, I don't "get" ghostty. I am not really seeing how this is so much better than the GNOME terminal that ships with my Linux distro. A lot of people are claiming that ghostty is "faster." I watched the lightning talk where the author claims that catting files and binaries is faster. I tried this against ghostty itself after building with zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast, using: time cat ghostty. In GNOME terminal, it took 3.340s. In ghostty, it took 16.947s. I must be doing something wrong?

infensus 2y ago
Are there any use cases for running `cat` on a binary without at least piping it somewhere? The output will be mostly garbage
matrixhelix 2y ago
The cool part is that you don’t have to “get” Ghostty, you can continue using whatever you prefer

thornewolf 2y ago

i use the base mac/Windows terminals and have never had any issues. what are the main things that draw people to alternatives?

ur-whale 2y ago
> what are the main things that draw people to alternatives? Speed.

ur-whale 2y ago

Real nice so far. The fact it does its own window decoration is a bit of a turn-off, but: A quick test of speed against wezterm and gnome-terminal show ghostty (on my laptop) to be around 3 times faster than both of the other. Will definitely try it for a couple of weeks.

geodel 2y ago

I wonder if there is any equivalent of 'iterm2 broadcast input' in ghostty. I use this pattern to deploy same application on multiple servers or checking logs on multiple servers for same service.

vinhnx 2y ago

Everything about it is so polished, it’s hard to believe it’s just a v1.0.0 release! The only thing I’m eagerly waiting for now is the implementation of search [1], but otherwise, it’s absolutely stellar.! I set Ghostty as my default terminal emulator now. [1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

aizk 2y ago

Wow, I had no idea ghostty was this much of a big deal. Really cool!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brundolf 2y ago

What's the elevator pitch vs other terminals?

CarlitosHighway 2y ago

Love this in theory but the first time user experience could be improved: $ brew install ghostty Launch it, don't configure anything, in the new terminal window then enter: $ lazydocker Response: 2024/12/28 09:04:42 An error occurred! Please create an issue at https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues *exec.ExitError exit status 1 /home/runner/work/lazydocker/lazydocker/main.go:96 (0x9397d7) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/internal/atomic/types.go:194 (0x43bc1b) /opt/hostedtoolcache/go/1.21.13/x64/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:1650 (0x46b9e1) Which does not happen with fresh out of the box Mac Terminals, iTerm. Probably it would be good to have less specific default options for people who just want to try it out before starting to configure it.

adamdecaf 2y ago
That’s a problem with lazydocker, not ghostty. Maybe contribute to https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues/610 https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/issues/610 ?
- CarlitosHighway 2y ago
  Do you have anything to back up this claim? Because it only crashes in Ghostty, and no other terminal emu I tried it in. Anyway, not my problem, I will just wait until it's fixed and if not, then I'll use one of the gazillion other ones that work 100%.
  - pjz 2y ago
    Crashing due to lack of a sufficient terminfo is indeed more of a lazydocker problem than a ghostty problem. See the issue above for a workaround.

graynk 2y ago

Looks pretty cool! Unfortunately I can't use it yet, as I am on a Ubuntu-based distro (Pop! OS 22.04), so my GTK version is not high enough. I imaging that's the case for a lot of people who stick to LTS versions. I may check it out on my Mac for work though

bpev 2y ago

So i've basically been a terminal.app purist, but downloaded ghostty on a whim because of all the excitement... I did not realize it would be THAT much faster. I guess I should have started using better terminals earlier

lgxz 2y ago

There are MANY problems with the default configuration. For example, the UP/DOWN key doesn't work, the TERM is xterm-ghostly...

mike31fr 2y ago

Many people here seem impressed about speed/performance. I have been using all sorts of terminals / emulators over the past 20 years and it never occurred to me a terminal can be slow. When I type a command, I just get the result instantaneously, for any terminal. What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow?

umvi 2y ago
> What are the use cases that can make a terminal be slow? Rendering huge stdout/stderr can be a bottleneck. Try running a program that writes half a million lines of text to stdout without file redirects and a lot of terminal emulators will struggle to keep up.
mike31fr 2y ago
TESTED: 1. Create a file with 1 million lines: for i in {1..1000000}; do echo "Line $i: This is a test of terminal performance."; done > bigfile.txt 2. cat the file and see how much time it takes: time cat bigfile.txt RESULTS: - iterm2: 3.5s - Default macOS terminal: 2.3s - Ghostty: 1.8s
danhau 2y ago
I don‘t get it either. The only use case I can see is for programs that output basically a video feed in text form. A commenter in this thread mentioned sifting through log / debug output… but why wouldn‘t you pipe it to a file instead?
itsn0tm3 2y ago
I think this mostly plays a role when using modal text editors like vim in your terminal. Speed matters so very much then! Give it a try if you want ;)
- mike31fr 2y ago
  Have you ever experienced vim being slow? If so, would you know how I could reproduce this?

anaumann 2y ago

Took me only ten minutes to tweak the config to my liking and recreate my color scheme from iterm. I’ve been using Ghostty for a day now and it simply works. Smooth, seamless and perfectly integrated to the point where this should just be the default terminal in macOS. P.S.: If you want to port your iterm color scheme, set: window-colorspace = display-p3 for the colors to match. (And bold-is-bright = true if you set this option in iterm)

denolfe 2y ago

I took this for a spin today. Coming from a long-time iTerm2 user, the first thing I noticed was how snappy everything feels, especially when resizing the window. The straight-forward configuration was extremely nice as well and can be stored in my dotfiles now (iTerm was a giant dump of XML). A few things that keep me from switching to it full time: - Missing search scrollback (cmd+f). This appears to be coming soon: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 - More of a nitpick than anything, but the only way to disable cursor blinking is to disable shell integration. Unfortunately, this means taking away things like native scrolling and likely some other things I don't know about. I see there is a discussion here to possibly address this: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812 I feel like this would be a no-brainer switch for me once the above are addressed.