4 ms·

Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?

smw 11mo ago
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
sramsay 11mo ago
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0. Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
commandersaki 11mo ago
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
- tristan957 11mo ago
  The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
mindcrash 11mo ago
While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html) Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
loeg 11mo ago
gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.
crims0n 11mo ago
One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html
neop1x 11mo ago
Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.
- tristan957 11mo ago
  I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot don't do that for me. Foot is great though.
  - viraptor 11mo ago
    They're all native applications.
    - saagarjha 11mo ago
      No, they're not. Don't be pedantic that it's native because it is written in Rust or whatever, that's clearly not what was meant.
      - viraptor 11mo ago
        There's no single definition of native. If it's clearly not that for you, feel free to say what's the threshold you use.
        saagarjha 11mo ago
        Using the platform native UI toolkit
  - NoGravitas 11mo ago
    After some update, Ghostty stopped working on Gnome+Mesa on older Intel graphics (IvyBridge). It doesn't really feel native to me if it doesn't run everywhere the toolkit it uses runs. I understand the reasons, but it leaves a sour taste.
- 11mo ago
tristan957 11mo ago
gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis, authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-terminal or gnome-console.
- WhyNotHugo 11mo ago
  Ghostty feels a lot less native than foot on Wayland. Example: it doesn't respect Fontconfig preferences, so it doesn't use your configured monospace font. In general, Ghostty feels quite alien for me.
dmytrokow 11mo ago
FWIW, I found no reason to switch from Konsole. But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.
sdqali 11mo ago
- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives. - It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control. Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.
- akho 11mo ago
  the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.
  - celrod 11mo ago
    I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab completion don't appeal to be. Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and reduced CPU use compared to foot I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive, and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.
  - sdqali 11mo ago
    I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.
Hazematman 11mo ago
My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52 support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will because of security concerns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495

smw 11mo ago

It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.

There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0. Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.

commandersaki 11mo ago

Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.

tristan957 11mo ago
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.

mindcrash 11mo ago

While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html) Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.

loeg 11mo ago

gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.

crims0n 11mo ago

One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html

neop1x 11mo ago

Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

tristan957 11mo ago
I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot don't do that for me. Foot is great though.
- viraptor 11mo ago
  They're all native applications.
  - saagarjha 11mo ago
    No, they're not. Don't be pedantic that it's native because it is written in Rust or whatever, that's clearly not what was meant.
    - viraptor 11mo ago
      There's no single definition of native. If it's clearly not that for you, feel free to say what's the threshold you use.
      - saagarjha 11mo ago
        Using the platform native UI toolkit
- NoGravitas 11mo ago
  After some update, Ghostty stopped working on Gnome+Mesa on older Intel graphics (IvyBridge). It doesn't really feel native to me if it doesn't run everywhere the toolkit it uses runs. I understand the reasons, but it leaves a sour taste.
11mo ago

tristan957 11mo ago

gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis, authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-terminal or gnome-console.

WhyNotHugo 11mo ago
Ghostty feels a lot less native than foot on Wayland. Example: it doesn't respect Fontconfig preferences, so it doesn't use your configured monospace font. In general, Ghostty feels quite alien for me.

dmytrokow 11mo ago

FWIW, I found no reason to switch from Konsole. But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.

sdqali 11mo ago

- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives. - It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control. Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.

akho 11mo ago
the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.
- celrod 11mo ago
  I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab completion don't appeal to be. Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and reduced CPU use compared to foot I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive, and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.
- sdqali 11mo ago
  I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.

Hazematman 11mo ago

My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52 support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will because of security concerns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495