12 ms·

Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

863 points by oli5679 7mo ago

michaelsbradley 7mo ago
I enjoy it, and it’s great to have another modern high performance terminal as an option for macOS and Linux. For me, Kitty still has the edge: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ WezTerm is also a strong contender: https://wezterm.org/ https://wezterm.org/
- anta40 7mo ago
  Wezterms is certainly nice. I guess they haven't release another update? Currently stick to iTerm2.
  - pkage 7mo ago
    I switched from iTerm2 because at the time (possibly still), iTerm2 had a performance bug where large amounts of underlined text would cause the terminal to slow down noticeably. Wezterm works perfectly, and I appreciate the .lua configuration over iTerm2's mess of menus.
- hn92726819 7mo ago
  When I tried Wezterm last year, you couldn't select more than 3-5 lines of text. I went to fix the 'bug', I found that it was intentional because it allocates a string and copies multiple times every time you click and drag. Even if that's fixed, that design put me off the terminal forever.
  - gertburger 7mo ago
    Been using/abusing wezterm for years, my scrollback is set to 1000000 and text selection has never been a problem... copy mode however does make it even easier
    - hn92726819 7mo ago
      I hed to look this up, so here's a correction: it was one large line logically split, not smaller lines. So you can't select, say, a long compact JSON line. Still not fixed: https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/3494 https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/3494
  - mkl 7mo ago
    I regularly select hundreds of lines in Wezterm. I have never had a problem.
dbgrman 7mo ago
i hope they implement something that can be used with tmux -CC mode.
selfawareMammal 7mo ago
Why is it in the main page? It's a super well-known project no?
- dewey 7mo ago
  Because someone thought it was interesting, and enough other people upvoted it.
- loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
  Just because you know about it doesn’t mean others can’t benefit from the mention. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- mberning 7mo ago
  It’s been posted many times, I think mostly due to it’s association to Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s left as an exercise the reader to determine why this is important.
  - ray_v 7mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
- baby 7mo ago
  Looking at the comments it seems like there are still people not using it
lomlobon 7mo ago
How's the latency? I've had to keep using xterm even though it kind of sucks just because it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit.
- 0sdi 7mo ago
  on my machine, noticeable. I seriously tried it, but went back because I could notice a small end-end latency, between keypress and action. But I'm also 240hz user.
  - kazinator 7mo ago
    Where are you measuring the keypress from? The nerve signal to your finger muscles?> Or the time the keycap hits bottom? What if the switch closes before the cap hits bottom: then we are getting a latency figure that looks better than it really is.
    - jstimpfle 7mo ago
      I've had a keyboard like that and with it, xterm (and nothing else) felt like it was displaying the characters even slightly before I had pressed them. It was a weird sensation (but good)
      - nickjj 7mo ago
        Yes, I know this feeling, it's like typing on air. The Windows Terminal has this same feeling. 8 years ago I opened this issue https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327 and the creators of the tool explained how they do it. xterm in X11 has this feeling, ghostty does not. It's like being stuck in mud but it's not just ghostty, all GPU accelerated terminals on Linux I tried have this muddy feel. It's interesting because moving windows around feels really smooth (much smoother than X11). I wish this topic was investigated in more depth because inputting text is an important part of a terminal. If anyone wants to experience this with Wayland, try not booting into your desktop environment straight into a tty and then type. xterm in X11 and the Windows Terminal feel like this.
baby 7mo ago
I use it but have people trier cmux?
dwedge 7mo ago
I like the look of this terminal, but it doesn't work correctly with SSH (top, ncdu for example) unless you hack the $TERM variable. It feels a bit vibecoded even though it isn't. To give a little productive criticism, one thing I really miss is when having tiled terminals, I want to be able to full screen one of them temporarily. Double click in iterm allows this, so does mod+f in i3wm. It really is the only thing stopping me from switching to this (and I admit it might be buried somewhere in the settings)
- 1f60c 7mo ago
  Using its own TERM is a deliberate design decision. I don't remember how to fix the terminal database, but it's pretty easy (your favorite search engine or LLM should be able to help you there).
  - ubercow13 7mo ago
    Or the manual, which describes the features for automatically handling it.
    - dwedge 7mo ago
      If I install a terminal and SSH doesn't work from it out of the box, I would describe that as a bug and wonder if I need to read the full manual to not fall foul of other gotchas
      - Daviey 7mo ago
        It is a bug.. But not with Ghostty...
        dwedge 7mo ago
        What do you think the bug is, exactly?
        deleted 7mo ago
pants2 7mo ago
Ghostty calls itself "feature rich" but only added cmd+F / find functionality a few months ago. Makes me wonder what other basic functions it's missing.
- msikora 7mo ago
  I have Ghostty 1.2.3 and it STILL does not have cmd+F find.
  - httgp 7mo ago
    It's been available on nightlies for a while, and should land in 1.3.0 in a week or two.
- KingMob 7mo ago
  A config page. Reasonable padding defaults. Probably more, but after dealing with unhelpful errors while trying to debug my config file, I figured I'd come back to ghostty another time.
saberience 7mo ago
It's a nice terminal but it cannot be configured to the same level as iTerm, e.g. in terms of colors, look and feel, how the menus work, how the tabs work, etc. Also, in practice, I find it hard to detect any performance difference between iTerm and Ghostty even though I know in theory that Ghostty is more performant... So for now I go with iTerm because I prefer the UI.
- reader9274 7mo ago
  I used to use the iTerm programmable notification bell which would ring when a particular output was printed in the terminal. Don't think I can do that in Ghostty
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
onionisafruit 7mo ago
I expected this to point to the 1.3.0 release since it’s expected in March. Hopefully we get that soon.
pdimitar 7mo ago
Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature. It also renders my prompt perfectly; no small pixel divergences like all other terminals have. Kitty I don't remember why I rejected. Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously. It's also likely I'll settle for some Linux-exclusive terminal but as I'm not yet possessing a Linux workstation (just a laptop) I haven't put the requisite time to do this research. Suggestions are welcome.
- macmccann 7mo ago
  there's scrollback search in the nightly build if that's an option for you (I've been using it a ton for a few months and haven't seen any bugs so far): https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip
- leetrout 7mo ago
  Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.
  - pdimitar 7mo ago
    I'll wait for the stable release and will retest it. Not in a rush and not the early adopter kind of guy.
    - davidkunz 7mo ago
      Give it "a week or two"
  - karmakaze 7mo ago
    Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do. BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?
kombine 7mo ago
If there wasn't kitty I'd definitely be using Ghostty, but I have no reason to switch.
bArray 7mo ago
For anyone using this terminal that hates != (and others) being turned into a single character, I have the following to turn off ligatures: font-feature = -dlig font-feature = -liga font-feature = -calt This can be updated in `$HOME/.config/ghostty/config`.
- mitchellh 7mo ago
  Note in Ghostty 1.3 we disable discretionary ligatures (I think dlig/calt) by default as recommended by font standards. We still enable liga though that usually contains far less controversial ligatures.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - vwkd 7mo ago
    Maybe only dlig was disabled? On tip I had to add `font-feature=-calt` to disable ligatures like != for Berkeley Mono v2.
- sideeffffect 7mo ago
  Or maybe you can solve it like I did -- by using a font that does the (IMHO) right thing with regards to ligatures https://github.com/0xType/0xProto#4-ligatures-that-dont-deform-shape https://github.com/0xType/0xProto#4-ligatures-that-dont-defo... I can't recommend 0xProto enough, the only thing I'm sorry about is that I didn't find it sooner :)
  - michaelcampbell 7mo ago
    Going to give this one a try; I'm still partial to Atkinson hyper legible, but this one looks fun.
mitchellh 7mo ago
I'm the original creator of Ghostty. It's been a few years now! I don't know why this is on the front page of HN again but let me give some meaningful updates across the board. First, libghostty is _way more exciting_ nowadays. It is already backing more than a dozen terminal projects that are free and commercial: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty I think this is the real future of Ghostty and I've said this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders. On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time. Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always. Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time). That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.
- nvme0n1p1 7mo ago
s_ting765 7mo ago
I tried this out after getting annoyed for the 100th time by a recent bug in kgx/console that will occasionally fail to launch windows leaving incomplete windows as tabs. Console has long since become abandonware pushing people towards ptyxis which is now the default gnome terminal. A damn shame considering console is basically complete software (the quality of software in gnome is on a downhill). I would have given ptyxis a chance if they didn't take a basic terminal and added some fluff (features related to distrobox) on top of other annoying things I can't be bothered to remember about because I ended up removing the software every time I gave it a spin. In just a few days I've been able to replace console with ghostty-nightly and I don't miss anything.
- kccqzy 7mo ago
  What features related to distrobox? I use both ptyxis and distrobox and I don’t notice any integration between them. I do notice an integration between ptyxis and sudo however. It simply turns the title bar red.
  - s_ting765 7mo ago
    > Ptyxis: Your Container-Oriented Terminal for GNOME > A modern terminal emulator built for the container era. Seamlessly navigate between your host system and local containers like Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox with intelligent detection and a beautiful, responsive GNOME interface. https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/blob/main/README....
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
bilinguliar 7mo ago
I like how snappy Ghostty is. I do not like how it starts lagging after a few alt-tabs to Chrome and back on Linux.
quantummagic 7mo ago
The minimum-contrast feature is great, to help in those times when some color combination would have been unreadable otherwise.
Myzel394 7mo ago
I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. However, for some reason ghostty sometimes has severe issues with dealing with SSH connections. The terminal is like broken and wrongly displayed and you can't properly type something. Therefore, I still use Kitty, especially for SSH connections. I don't know what `kitten ssh` does, but it makes my terminal work with SSH.
- icedrift 7mo ago
  This is what kills it for me. Half the time I'm using a terminal I'm sshing and the fact that I need to copy over term-info on virtually every machine keeps me from using it more often. Even copying term-info doesn't always fix it. From what I've read it's not entirely ghostty's fault but as a user it's frustrating.
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    you can always export TERM=xterm or some other value if that's causing you grief while distros catch up.
  - bewuethr 7mo ago
    Have you seen the `ssh-terminfo` option for shell integration? https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-integration-features https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-integration-...
    - icedrift 7mo ago
      No I haven't seen that before. I used to just run the terminfo tic command that's recommended in the top searches and when that started failing I just swapped back to default terminal for SSH
- tasuki 7mo ago
  > I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. What are you talking about? What UI does Kitty have?
tux1968 7mo ago
Ghostty's terminfo entry doesn't enable 24-bit color*, and as far as I can tell they don't provide a "ghostty-direct" entry that does. It just seemed odd that it's completely supported and working, yet not easily enabled. Maybe I just missed a trick, and didn't need to make a custom terminfo entry myself? * "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.
systima 7mo ago
[dead]
tw1984 7mo ago
just installed ghostty, looks cool. but my honest question is how it is significantly better than iterm2 to justify such a switch? I am aware of the fact that it is faster, uses less memory, various configurations is more straight forward. but is that all? I have the feeling that I must be missing something big here.
- deanputney 7mo ago
  Same. As far as I can tell, Ghostty is still in active development and unfinished. For regular use iTerm 2 is a complete product that can be relied upon.
- allthetime 7mo ago
  I’ve been using iTerm2 for years. I’ve tried ghostty a few times and quickly went back to iterm each time for various reasons I can’t immediately recall. There is nothing I can think of lacking from iterm. That said; if I was working more on Linux or Windows where iterm doesn’t exist it looks like ghostty would be a good option.
thallavajhula 7mo ago
When Ghostty was publicly announced, I used it for a few months and gave up on it due to the lack of support for the CMD+F feature that I use Terminal.app. This is a critical feature for me while tailing logs on my local. I tried the workaround of capturing the text into a text file and then searching it. It just didn't work for my workflow and dropped it. Ghostty is great otherwise. But, without the CMD+F, it's of no use to me.
- retlehs 7mo ago
  The tip releases have had search support for a few months: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 As Mitchell stated above: > Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.
- WA 7mo ago
  Same. Lack of search and lack of scrollbars make me wonder why this project got so much attention in the first place. iTerm2 seems way more capable. I suspect it is "just" the very nice-looking default theme in Ghostty. I updated my iTerm2 colors with colors I picked from Tailwind‘s excellent color palette and iterm2 now feels fresh and has all the features I want.
  - skywhopper 7mo ago
    Mitchell’s attempts at more correctness and better speed, plus the no-nonsense UX. iTerm2 is confusing and overwhelming and bloated for those of us who just want a terminal that works.
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  Sounds like that’s coming in the next release per Mitchell’s comments above, fwiw.
yearolinuxdsktp 7mo ago
It’s a shame that version 1.2.x got abandoned and didn’t receive any important bug fixes. That has severely cut my trust into this project. It’s been over 4 months since the last 1.2.3 release, so the memory leak when using Claude is not addressed, my Ghostty crashes are not addressed (crash reporter doesn’t work), I don’t even bother looking at the issues anymore, as I know I am not getting the fixes for a long time. And I’m not running a critical piece of productivity software on a nightlies channel!
- sgarland 7mo ago
  I'm not doubting your personal experience, but I find the crashes you mentioned surprising; I have never once, since v1.0.1, had Ghostty crash. Tbf I use it with tmux, so I'm not exercising some of its capabilities. But with tmux, I have at any given time 5-7 sessions, each with 2-5 windows, some with panes.
  - hectormalot 7mo ago
    Datapoint: I’m running nightly now because the latest 1.2 release has a known crash-on-wake bug when disconnecting an external monitor. Accordingly the issue tracker it was fixed months ago, but it’s not in a release. The nightly is stable though. Didn’t realize how may projects use libghostty, will try cmux one of these days.
- sam1522 7mo ago
  you should try foot terminal, i have been using for the past couple of months and it is quite good
whalesalad 7mo ago
I keep trying it but keep coming back to alacritty on Linux and iterm2 on osx.
p0w3n3d 7mo ago
On the new mac tahoe with rounded corners (which are really frustrating to me), ghostty should add small margin on the bottom, because the font is sometimes renedered on it and letters are cut (rarely but infuriating, when it happens)
- gtirloni 7mo ago
  Worth posting here: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions
pbjerkeseth 7mo ago
I have a terminal manager project[0] I'm currently using xterm for, but very curious to try libghostty. Have mainly been hesitant because it hasn't been promoted from an internal ghostty dependency (only awareness of the place was from this article by the creator[1]), but from the sounds of it here people are finding it stable enough. Gonna give it a whirl today. [0]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit [1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
gigatexal 7mo ago
Bigger than ghostty is libghostty which enables things like: https://www.cmux.dev/ https://www.cmux.dev/
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  I tried it when it last had an HN post (a week ago?) and found it to be very buggy and went straight back to Ghostty.
  - gigatexal 7mo ago
    what bugs did you hit? I have been using it a few days now no issues.
    - operatingthetan 7mo ago
      When I had 3 or more panes open one of them would freeze and be not recoverable without quitting the app. That's a deal killer when I'm trying to run 2 or 3 agents.
      - gigatexal 7mo ago
        I’ll try that at work tomorrow. Interesting corner case. I wonder why it happens.
        gigatexal 7mo ago
        I had no crashes it just takes ages to resize with cmd + or -
- AdrienBrault 7mo ago
  Very happy after a few days switching from ghostty to cmux
JCattheATM 7mo ago
Curious to hear some more recommendations, I settled on using lxterminal which works well enough. I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did, kitty doesn't support tabs and ghosttty sounds like it has issues with ssh connections? I feel like I tried most at some point but if anyone has suggestions for a tabbed terminal emulator nicer than lxterminal, ideally with transparency, I'd love to hear them.
- TehCorwiz 7mo ago
  As a counterpoint to Ghostty ssh. I have literally never had an issue and I manage a large cluster of boxes that run everything from centos 7 to rocky 10. All from ghostty on a Mac.
  - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 7mo ago
    If you don't mind, can you share your config?
am17an 7mo ago
Damn I’m jealous that they figured out how to pay their contributors. I’ve been toiling away for free
big-chungus4 7mo ago
Bro randomly decides to post a link to ghosty docs and gets 275 points
- mkl 7mo ago
  Submission upvotes don't count nearly as much as comment upvotes in terms of points.
- sam1522 7mo ago
  Yeah, i have been using foot so far as i found ghostty and warp terminals too much memory consuming
signorovitch 7mo ago
My only issue with ghostty is it isn’t immediately recognized by some programs through ssh (eg less) and they don’t operate properly. However there’s a one liner that solves the problem permanently on the remote machine[0] so it isn’t too bad. Hopefully in the near future ghostty’s terminfo will be shipped with common linux distros. [0] https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo
- dmix 7mo ago
  I haven't used ghostty but terminal having issues with ssh sounds like a major oversight.
- oofbey 7mo ago
  I find this docs page fairly hilarious. Complaining about how the rest of the world is in the stone ages, and that is why ghostty doesn’t work with it. For me, a terminal program that requires me to muck with every machine I log into to get it to work is pretty horrible. I connect to a lot of different machines every work dat. Often they’re not machines I maintain. Making that harder is exactly the opposite of what I want from a key tool like a terminal program.
  - cbushko 7mo ago
    All of those terminals work for you now because someone went and added terminfo to ncurses which distributed it across all versions of linux. Kitty needed to do it too back in 2018. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00005.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00... Note: Ghostty follows the same pattern as Kitty where they a) use their own terminfo, b) distribute it when ssh'ing (it gets pushed to the remote server) and c) added it to ncurses so that it will eventually go away.
- randusername 7mo ago
  Apparently changing $TERM from `screen-256color` to `tmux-256color` in tmux to try and get italics working in nvim totally mangled ghostty. I looked into infocmp and other tricks to try and and figure out why the backspace key was throwing gibberish around, but I had no interest in debugging such an inscrutable thing through so many layers. I don't fault ghostty for things like this, but at the same time it's hard not to scorn the tools you want to be invisible, even if making unreasonable demands of them on accident.
eoskx 7mo ago
Tried Ghostty several times and I really appreciate the font rendering, but I keep going back to iTerm2 and Terminal.app mostly because of lack of scroll back & CMD-F, etc. Looking forward to what is coming in the next release.
jbrooks84 7mo ago
Why use this over iterm 2?
- ashton314 7mo ago
  Ghostty is extremely performant. I had a bug in some concurrent software; when I added logging the bug would disappear because the threads acquiring the lock on STDERR was sufficient to make the bug go away. On Ghostty this happened fast enough that I was able to reproduce the bug. Maybe I should have been writing everything to a file. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, I didn’t think of it at the time and Ghostty saved me.
Acur 7mo ago
Really nice terminal. Unfortunately scrolling in terminal apps via mouse wheel seems to be broken (on release and main branch), which is currently a blocker for me. Hope this will be fixed soon.
lukaslalinsky 7mo ago
What kind of features am I missing if I just use GNOME Terminal?
- veqq 7mo ago
  The biggest boon is that it's a development target for making TUIs etc. App developers get the most benefit out of it.
wateralien 7mo ago
Can't use it yet because I need cmd-f find.
vermon 7mo ago
I've been following this before it was made public and I'm a big Zig fan so I would definitely switch to this, but I've tried and failed many times. Currently it just keeps crashing multiple times (on three different machines) each day on my mac and the quick terminal doesn't support full screen mode (it still shows the menu bar). I could live with the menu bar showing, but because of the constant crashing I'll wait for a bit and check back in a few months.
yomismoaqui 7mo ago
The fetishization of tools is one of the things that mark a dilettante mindset. You see it on all hobbies, e.g. when the someone sees a photograph and their first question is about what camera and optics were used. No question about composition, light, the moment, creativity... they only care for the tools. The technique and knowledge is the important thing, not the tools. They forget the good practitioner can do a great photo with a $200 phone than they with the best Canon DSLR. I have seen this in all hobbies I have practiced, be it musical instruments, kolinsky brushes on miniature painting, montain bikers, running apparell... As I'm getting older I care less about editors, terminals, Linux distros... and after seeing what can be done with agentic coding tools less so.
- shimman 7mo ago
  I don't feel like this is a fair argument because different tools help different workflows. Since there is always a continuous growth of new people learning new things, it would make sense that tools change over time. Especially in a realm that is digital, not physical. FWIW once I found my workflow (vim + tmux) I stopped caring so much about chasing "new" tools. Now have the luxury to wait 3-5 years and see what's worth adopting, most of it isn't only because I already found a workflow that works for me; but if you're new or still finding what works best, you'll always be experimenting.
  - guerrilla 7mo ago
    Dude we are literally talking about a single text box in a window in this case.
    - shimman 7mo ago
      Yes and people feel very strongly about this text box. Some people like multiple text boxes, others just like one single text box.
      - guerrilla 7mo ago
        Those people should focus more on not writing such absurdly bloated software instead.
rothific 7mo ago
Feature request: renaming tabs! Helps keep tabs organized instead of 20 tabs with similar names. (See Zed for example) Also! I'm considering Ghostty web (https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web) for my project Ink Web. It's awesome that Ghostty can work in the browser to replace xterm.js. https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1 https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1 Project: https://www.ink-web.dev/ https://www.ink-web.dev/
WhereIsTheTruth 7mo ago
I can't find an alternative to Terminator, being able to drag and drop panels to create layouts is such a strong workflow that it's very hard to give up I did give Ghostty a try, the turn off was Adwaita, the tablet UI for the tabs and context menu.. i just can't
submeta 7mo ago
Ghostty is fast and feels native, but WezTerm occupies a different niche: it's a terminal you program rather than configure. The Lua config isn't just "dynamic" in the abstract sense. I built a tmuxinator-style workspace manager that spawns project-specific layouts - named tabs, splits, working directories, startup commands - from a fuzzy launcher. Session state auto-saves every 10 minutes with timestamped snapshots and crash recovery. Theme toggling between dark and light mode triggers a system-wide theme switch script. These are runtime behaviors, not static settings - try doing any of that in TOML. The built-in multiplexer is the other major differentiator. Splits, directional navigation, pane zoom, pane selection with alphabet overlays, moving panes between tabs or windows, all without a tmux prefix key. It's not just "WezTerm has splits too, it's that the interaction model is fundamentally more fluid when there's no mode switching. WezTerm isn't trying to be the fastest terminal. It's trying to be the most programmable one, and for people who want their terminal to work as a development environment rather than a PTY renderer, that tradeoff is worth it.
thepancake 7mo ago
[flagged]
sponno 7mo ago
Loving how well Ghostty works and looks. When running several Projects I need quite a few tabs as all these AI agents take sometime to complete. Overhead tabs get real messy very quickly. Multiple windows become a nightmare quickly. Side bar tabs have been my solution. I love iTerms sidebar tabs - I add emojis to mine for my key projects and any subtask just lives under the master tab like a folder. Would love to see sidebar tabs - or it sounds like I can code my own.
- HatchedLake721 7mo ago
  Ghostty with sidebars and more https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
MajorBee 7mo ago
While I quite liked Ghostty to being with, the lack of a scripting API quickly drove me to WezTerm before long. See: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353 I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important to my personal git worktree ergonomics.
ionwake 7mo ago
Ive been using Ghostty after AI recommended it for lightweight claude sessions. No complaints been happy using it for my claude swarms for about a month
cwel 7mo ago
Ghostty is awesome, ill echo the sentiment regarding lack of IPC/scripting API being my current hold back. Sticking with kitty til then. I still keep the ghostty binary on hand so I can +boo :^) for libghostty consumers, favorite i've tried so far is neurosnap/zmx.
dang 7mo ago
These look like the major past threads (in reverse order) - have I missed any? AI Usage Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 - Jan 2026 (273 comments) Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568794 - Jan 2026 (138 comments) Why users cannot create Issues directly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 - Jan 2026 (310 comments) Ghostty is now non-profit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138238 - Dec 2025 (289 comments) Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110842 - Dec 2025 (115 comments) Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 - Oct 2025 (147 comments) Ghostty 1.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252026 - Sept 2025 (26 comments) AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568 - Aug 2025 (464 comments) We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905808 - Aug 2025 (224 comments) Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930 - Jan 2025 (79 comments) Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 - Dec 2024 (55 comments) Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 - Dec 2024 (7 comments) Ghostty 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 - Dec 2024 (681 comments) Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments)
Newuser6923 7mo ago
This is a test comment
mastabadtomm 7mo ago
We often see Ghostty on the front page. What makes this project special? Is it solving a big problem with current terminal apps?
- nout 7mo ago
  In my experience it actually is. I went through multiple terminals and they all had issues for me (missing key remapping functionality, slowness, not working across platforms, UI ugly...), but Ghostty is solving most of these.
jfkimmes 7mo ago
Funny, I was just configuring ghostty. I finally made the jump in order to get rid of tmux as a layer of indirection. Here's what I landed on: This config tries to emulate as much of tmux with native ghostty features (splits and tabs). https://codeberg.org/jfkimmes/dotfiles/src/branch/master/ghostty.conf https://codeberg.org/jfkimmes/dotfiles/src/branch/master/gho...
- qudat 7mo ago
  Add https://zmx.sh https://zmx.sh into the mix for detach/attach functionality. It uses libghostty for rehydrating session state and scrollback
orsorna 7mo ago
I've only ever stuck with urxvt and more recently foot since moving to Wayland. On Mac the default terminal works for me, though I've been using Ghostty to follow a trend, but I seriously don't understand the benefits netted to me? (other than the cool icon)
- commandersaki 7mo ago
  I stayed with Terminal.app for quite awhile. Until very recently (not when Ghostty was released) it didn't have 24-bit colour support. It also didn't have shell integrations such as triple click to select all output of the last command. The configuration system is arse and is kind of a lock-in as it is in all plist form, so I had a hard time extracting the colours I used for my terminal and using them elsewhere. Now that they've updated it recently, it is a better terminal, but otherwise Ghostty has a few bells and whistles that make the experience nicer.
jovial_cavalier 7mo ago
why does everyone freak out about this terminal whenever it's posted?
brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
How much of ghostty is written by Claude?
- lambdas 7mo ago
  Mitchell Hashimoto doesn’t need LLM’s, LLM’s need Mitchell Hashimoto
  - rafamvc 7mo ago
    This was a great interview but Mitchell: https://youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU https://youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU He covers his LLM uses too! Highly recommend, and Mitchell thoughts on open source inspired me to start contributing to projects outside of my common experience.
  - KingMob 7mo ago
    Ewww, hero worship.
    - lambdas 7mo ago
      I was more getting at the angle that when people say things like “Wow, I asked AI to code a terminal emulator and it got it mostly right!”, it’s not because the LLM is amazingly smart only by inference, it’s been trained on the appropriated code of individuals like the above.
danhergir 7mo ago
I've used Ghostty in the past, but nowadays it's hard to use it since you have to take in count that running agents requires using tmux sessions which is something Ghostty does not support very well
guerrilla 7mo ago
How is it possible that this thing constantly gets so much hype? It's a terminal emulator.
- jorams 7mo ago
  It helps a bit that it's written in Zig, but its primary differentiating feature in the sea of terminal emulators is that it's created by mitchellh, who is kind of a celebrity in some circles.
  - TheFlyingFish 7mo ago
    He's living the hacker dream. Made a billion bucks, then went right back to writing code. People upvote because they wish they were him.
- KingMob 7mo ago
  Beats me. Its hype is all out of proportion to its features. Maybe this is why the creator is touting the use of libghostty, the underlying library.
Sophira 7mo ago
I've never quite understood why terminal emulators nowadays have GPU acceleration. They've not been slow for a long time. What am I missing?
- hoherd 7mo ago
  If you compare them side by side, you actually can see how slow some of them are. The way I compare is to open them all up tiled on my display joined to the same tmux session, then try doing heavy redraw operations, like maybe cmatrix. You can clearly see how some of them are quick at redrawing, and some are not. Some people do not care about the difference, but it is definitely there. See also https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/
- cactusplant7374 7mo ago
  I've commented on this before. Sign of the times. People like anything related to GPUs. In my personal coding projects I've even been tempted to ask the agent: "What features can I add that use the GPU?"
dayone1 7mo ago
Is there a windows equivalent to what Ghostty is? Windows Terminal is really slow
whitten 7mo ago
Does ghostty support single duplex ? I couldn’t find out. Also, does it support visible control characters ? EXACT EMULATION ? 3270 ? VT-105 ? VT-220 ? VT-320 ? VT-420 ? SIXEL ? NAPLPS ?
zerebos 7mo ago
Bit of a shameless plug, but for those looking to configure Ghostty using an actual GUI, you can use this web tool I've been maintaining since the original closed beta of Ghostty https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config
- RulerOf 7mo ago
  Thank you for dropping this link. I opened ghostty for the first same, then when preferences dropped me into a TUI editor with no syntax highlighting I closed it and reopened iTerm. I liked the idea of a fast new terminal, but not enough to RTFM before figuring out if it was worth switching.
xannabxlle 7mo ago
Speaking of foot, are you going to do a client server architecture for instant terminal setup? Foot instances start up very fast due to this
kjsingh 7mo ago
I started using ghostty coz I needed different terminals for all those AI agents. E.g. with MacOS terminal, I launch Claude, with Ghostty, I launch opencode, with Attyx I launch pi
kelvinjps10 7mo ago
For people that use it and have used kitty, how do you find it better? I don't want to be pedantic or anything I just want to know if I'm missing out, I installed some time ago but didn't find anything really interesting
_giorgio_ 7mo ago
I haven't tried Ghostty yet, but for a windows user the combo: wt.exe https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=US https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=U... pwsh.exe https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/install-powershell-on-windows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta... is really powerful, it has finally driven me away from conemu, which was really bad with claude (lots of fonts problems).
purpleredrose 7mo ago
Serious question here, not trolling. Ghostty looks great; obviously a lot of hard work went into it. My question is why? I am seriously curious about what motivated you to make this considering the space is already so crowded with reasonable solutions. I see this kind of almost duplication of effort a lot, and I am really interested in what motivates people to undertake these kind of projects.
- purpleredrose 7mo ago
  Still curious
- sumedh 7mo ago
  Why do you need a new search engine called Google when you have Yahoo Search, Ask Jeeves etc. People do it because they care about some X factor, maybe they dont like that most existing terminals are slow and they want to build a better product.
threekindwords 7mo ago
ghostty has extensive shader support and claude knows how to write shaders... i was tired of staring at boring black rectangles all day... so i built a shader that fills the background with slow-moving color gradients. every window gets its own palette that drifts over an hour. i think it's beautiful without being distracting. thank you mitchell and contributors for implementing and supporting animated shaders! thank you to the folks who have shared their shader code in public so i could build this! it was so much fun to make and i use it everywhere https://github.com/mfelix/chromadrift https://github.com/mfelix/chromadrift stay gold, shine bright
7e 7mo ago
This project makes me wish item were faster, because it’s way more useable.
dbgrman 7mo ago
Love the product. Have you considered implementing panes and windows that work with tmux’s CC mode? Any considerations specifically for claude code or agentic terminal users?
bmn__ 7mo ago
> Ghostty is […] feature-rich […] uses platform-native UI What goes through the head of a developer when writing such blatant lies in the introduction text? What does he think he accomplishes by doing so? Is he so deluded that he thinks behaviour like this is somehow socially acceptable and the readers just nod along and no one is going notice and criticise him for that? Really, it's like the mind of children in an adult body, no concept of reputational damage. I just installed Ghostty and cannot help but conclude that the claims are wrong, abundantly so. Compare it with the incumbent Konsole. It is clear to anyone to see that Ghostty has about 0.3% of its features. If I were to enumerate everything that's missing, I would not be able to stop until tomorrow. It suffices to point out that there is no menu bar, no icon toolbar, no l10n, no settings dialogue, no key-bindings dialogue, no scrollbar, no search, and it would go on and on and on. The sad thing is, if the developer actually used the platform-native UI like he claims, then he would instantly get the first five without lifting a finger!
intaek 7mo ago
I made a simple TUI Ghostty config manager called Ghofig. Try it out. https://github.com/intaek-h/ghofig https://github.com/intaek-h/ghofig
mjcarden 7mo ago
Installed the snap on Ubuntu 24.04 and when I used it to look at /etc/sudoers.d/README, it emitted: WARNING: terminal is not fully functional Press RETURN to continue ...which I thought a little odd.

863 points by oli5679 7mo ago

I enjoy it, and it’s great to have another modern high performance terminal as an option for macOS and Linux. For me, Kitty still has the edge: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ WezTerm is also a strong contender: https://wezterm.org/ https://wezterm.org/

anta40 7mo ago
Wezterms is certainly nice. I guess they haven't release another update? Currently stick to iTerm2.
- pkage 7mo ago
  I switched from iTerm2 because at the time (possibly still), iTerm2 had a performance bug where large amounts of underlined text would cause the terminal to slow down noticeably. Wezterm works perfectly, and I appreciate the .lua configuration over iTerm2's mess of menus.
hn92726819 7mo ago
When I tried Wezterm last year, you couldn't select more than 3-5 lines of text. I went to fix the 'bug', I found that it was intentional because it allocates a string and copies multiple times every time you click and drag. Even if that's fixed, that design put me off the terminal forever.
- gertburger 7mo ago
  Been using/abusing wezterm for years, my scrollback is set to 1000000 and text selection has never been a problem... copy mode however does make it even easier
  - hn92726819 7mo ago
    I hed to look this up, so here's a correction: it was one large line logically split, not smaller lines. So you can't select, say, a long compact JSON line. Still not fixed: https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/3494 https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/3494
- mkl 7mo ago
  I regularly select hundreds of lines in Wezterm. I have never had a problem.

dbgrman 7mo ago

i hope they implement something that can be used with tmux -CC mode.

selfawareMammal 7mo ago

Why is it in the main page? It's a super well-known project no?

dewey 7mo ago
Because someone thought it was interesting, and enough other people upvoted it.
loloquwowndueo 7mo ago
Just because you know about it doesn’t mean others can’t benefit from the mention. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
mberning 7mo ago
It’s been posted many times, I think mostly due to it’s association to Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s left as an exercise the reader to determine why this is important.
- ray_v 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
baby 7mo ago
Looking at the comments it seems like there are still people not using it

lomlobon 7mo ago

How's the latency? I've had to keep using xterm even though it kind of sucks just because it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit.

0sdi 7mo ago
on my machine, noticeable. I seriously tried it, but went back because I could notice a small end-end latency, between keypress and action. But I'm also 240hz user.
- kazinator 7mo ago
  Where are you measuring the keypress from? The nerve signal to your finger muscles?> Or the time the keycap hits bottom? What if the switch closes before the cap hits bottom: then we are getting a latency figure that looks better than it really is.
  - jstimpfle 7mo ago
    I've had a keyboard like that and with it, xterm (and nothing else) felt like it was displaying the characters even slightly before I had pressed them. It was a weird sensation (but good)
    - nickjj 7mo ago
      Yes, I know this feeling, it's like typing on air. The Windows Terminal has this same feeling. 8 years ago I opened this issue https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327 and the creators of the tool explained how they do it. xterm in X11 has this feeling, ghostty does not. It's like being stuck in mud but it's not just ghostty, all GPU accelerated terminals on Linux I tried have this muddy feel. It's interesting because moving windows around feels really smooth (much smoother than X11). I wish this topic was investigated in more depth because inputting text is an important part of a terminal. If anyone wants to experience this with Wayland, try not booting into your desktop environment straight into a tty and then type. xterm in X11 and the Windows Terminal feel like this.

baby 7mo ago

I use it but have people trier cmux?

dwedge 7mo ago

I like the look of this terminal, but it doesn't work correctly with SSH (top, ncdu for example) unless you hack the $TERM variable. It feels a bit vibecoded even though it isn't. To give a little productive criticism, one thing I really miss is when having tiled terminals, I want to be able to full screen one of them temporarily. Double click in iterm allows this, so does mod+f in i3wm. It really is the only thing stopping me from switching to this (and I admit it might be buried somewhere in the settings)

1f60c 7mo ago
Using its own TERM is a deliberate design decision. I don't remember how to fix the terminal database, but it's pretty easy (your favorite search engine or LLM should be able to help you there).
- ubercow13 7mo ago
  Or the manual, which describes the features for automatically handling it.
  - dwedge 7mo ago
    If I install a terminal and SSH doesn't work from it out of the box, I would describe that as a bug and wonder if I need to read the full manual to not fall foul of other gotchas
    - Daviey 7mo ago
      It is a bug.. But not with Ghostty...
      - dwedge 7mo ago
        What do you think the bug is, exactly?
        deleted 7mo ago

pants2 7mo ago

Ghostty calls itself "feature rich" but only added cmd+F / find functionality a few months ago. Makes me wonder what other basic functions it's missing.

msikora 7mo ago
I have Ghostty 1.2.3 and it STILL does not have cmd+F find.
- httgp 7mo ago
  It's been available on nightlies for a while, and should land in 1.3.0 in a week or two.
KingMob 7mo ago
A config page. Reasonable padding defaults. Probably more, but after dealing with unhelpful errors while trying to debug my config file, I figured I'd come back to ghostty another time.

saberience 7mo ago

It's a nice terminal but it cannot be configured to the same level as iTerm, e.g. in terms of colors, look and feel, how the menus work, how the tabs work, etc. Also, in practice, I find it hard to detect any performance difference between iTerm and Ghostty even though I know in theory that Ghostty is more performant... So for now I go with iTerm because I prefer the UI.

reader9274 7mo ago
I used to use the iTerm programmable notification bell which would ring when a particular output was printed in the terminal. Don't think I can do that in Ghostty
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

onionisafruit 7mo ago

I expected this to point to the 1.3.0 release since it’s expected in March. Hopefully we get that soon.

pdimitar 7mo ago

Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature. It also renders my prompt perfectly; no small pixel divergences like all other terminals have. Kitty I don't remember why I rejected. Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously. It's also likely I'll settle for some Linux-exclusive terminal but as I'm not yet possessing a Linux workstation (just a laptop) I haven't put the requisite time to do this research. Suggestions are welcome.

macmccann 7mo ago
there's scrollback search in the nightly build if that's an option for you (I've been using it a ton for a few months and haven't seen any bugs so far): https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip
leetrout 7mo ago
Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.
- pdimitar 7mo ago
  I'll wait for the stable release and will retest it. Not in a rush and not the early adopter kind of guy.
  - davidkunz 7mo ago
    Give it "a week or two"
- karmakaze 7mo ago
  Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do. BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?

kombine 7mo ago

If there wasn't kitty I'd definitely be using Ghostty, but I have no reason to switch.

bArray 7mo ago

For anyone using this terminal that hates != (and others) being turned into a single character, I have the following to turn off ligatures: font-feature = -dlig font-feature = -liga font-feature = -calt This can be updated in `$HOME/.config/ghostty/config`.

mitchellh 7mo ago
Note in Ghostty 1.3 we disable discretionary ligatures (I think dlig/calt) by default as recommended by font standards. We still enable liga though that usually contains far less controversial ligatures.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- vwkd 7mo ago
  Maybe only dlig was disabled? On tip I had to add `font-feature=-calt` to disable ligatures like != for Berkeley Mono v2.
sideeffffect 7mo ago
Or maybe you can solve it like I did -- by using a font that does the (IMHO) right thing with regards to ligatures https://github.com/0xType/0xProto#4-ligatures-that-dont-deform-shape https://github.com/0xType/0xProto#4-ligatures-that-dont-defo... I can't recommend 0xProto enough, the only thing I'm sorry about is that I didn't find it sooner :)
- michaelcampbell 7mo ago
  Going to give this one a try; I'm still partial to Atkinson hyper legible, but this one looks fun.

mitchellh 7mo ago

I'm the original creator of Ghostty. It's been a few years now! I don't know why this is on the front page of HN again but let me give some meaningful updates across the board. First, libghostty is _way more exciting_ nowadays. It is already backing more than a dozen terminal projects that are free and commercial: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty I think this is the real future of Ghostty and I've said this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders. On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time. Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always. Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time). That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.

nvme0n1p1 7mo ago

s_ting765 7mo ago

I tried this out after getting annoyed for the 100th time by a recent bug in kgx/console that will occasionally fail to launch windows leaving incomplete windows as tabs. Console has long since become abandonware pushing people towards ptyxis which is now the default gnome terminal. A damn shame considering console is basically complete software (the quality of software in gnome is on a downhill). I would have given ptyxis a chance if they didn't take a basic terminal and added some fluff (features related to distrobox) on top of other annoying things I can't be bothered to remember about because I ended up removing the software every time I gave it a spin. In just a few days I've been able to replace console with ghostty-nightly and I don't miss anything.

kccqzy 7mo ago
What features related to distrobox? I use both ptyxis and distrobox and I don’t notice any integration between them. I do notice an integration between ptyxis and sudo however. It simply turns the title bar red.
- s_ting765 7mo ago
  > Ptyxis: Your Container-Oriented Terminal for GNOME > A modern terminal emulator built for the container era. Seamlessly navigate between your host system and local containers like Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox with intelligent detection and a beautiful, responsive GNOME interface. https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/blob/main/README....
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]

bilinguliar 7mo ago

I like how snappy Ghostty is. I do not like how it starts lagging after a few alt-tabs to Chrome and back on Linux.

quantummagic 7mo ago

The minimum-contrast feature is great, to help in those times when some color combination would have been unreadable otherwise.

Myzel394 7mo ago

I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. However, for some reason ghostty sometimes has severe issues with dealing with SSH connections. The terminal is like broken and wrongly displayed and you can't properly type something. Therefore, I still use Kitty, especially for SSH connections. I don't know what `kitten ssh` does, but it makes my terminal work with SSH.

icedrift 7mo ago
This is what kills it for me. Half the time I'm using a terminal I'm sshing and the fact that I need to copy over term-info on virtually every machine keeps me from using it more often. Even copying term-info doesn't always fix it. From what I've read it's not entirely ghostty's fault but as a user it's frustrating.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  you can always export TERM=xterm or some other value if that's causing you grief while distros catch up.
- bewuethr 7mo ago
  Have you seen the `ssh-terminfo` option for shell integration? https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-integration-features https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-integration-...
  - icedrift 7mo ago
    No I haven't seen that before. I used to just run the terminfo tic command that's recommended in the top searches and when that started failing I just swapped back to default terminal for SSH
tasuki 7mo ago
> I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. What are you talking about? What UI does Kitty have?

tux1968 7mo ago

Ghostty's terminfo entry doesn't enable 24-bit color*, and as far as I can tell they don't provide a "ghostty-direct" entry that does. It just seemed odd that it's completely supported and working, yet not easily enabled. Maybe I just missed a trick, and didn't need to make a custom terminfo entry myself? * "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.

systima 7mo ago

[dead]

tw1984 7mo ago

just installed ghostty, looks cool. but my honest question is how it is significantly better than iterm2 to justify such a switch? I am aware of the fact that it is faster, uses less memory, various configurations is more straight forward. but is that all? I have the feeling that I must be missing something big here.

deanputney 7mo ago
Same. As far as I can tell, Ghostty is still in active development and unfinished. For regular use iTerm 2 is a complete product that can be relied upon.
allthetime 7mo ago
I’ve been using iTerm2 for years. I’ve tried ghostty a few times and quickly went back to iterm each time for various reasons I can’t immediately recall. There is nothing I can think of lacking from iterm. That said; if I was working more on Linux or Windows where iterm doesn’t exist it looks like ghostty would be a good option.

thallavajhula 7mo ago

When Ghostty was publicly announced, I used it for a few months and gave up on it due to the lack of support for the CMD+F feature that I use Terminal.app. This is a critical feature for me while tailing logs on my local. I tried the workaround of capturing the text into a text file and then searching it. It just didn't work for my workflow and dropped it. Ghostty is great otherwise. But, without the CMD+F, it's of no use to me.

retlehs 7mo ago
The tip releases have had search support for a few months: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 As Mitchell stated above: > Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.
WA 7mo ago
Same. Lack of search and lack of scrollbars make me wonder why this project got so much attention in the first place. iTerm2 seems way more capable. I suspect it is "just" the very nice-looking default theme in Ghostty. I updated my iTerm2 colors with colors I picked from Tailwind‘s excellent color palette and iterm2 now feels fresh and has all the features I want.
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  Mitchell’s attempts at more correctness and better speed, plus the no-nonsense UX. iTerm2 is confusing and overwhelming and bloated for those of us who just want a terminal that works.
skywhopper 7mo ago
Sounds like that’s coming in the next release per Mitchell’s comments above, fwiw.

yearolinuxdsktp 7mo ago

It’s a shame that version 1.2.x got abandoned and didn’t receive any important bug fixes. That has severely cut my trust into this project. It’s been over 4 months since the last 1.2.3 release, so the memory leak when using Claude is not addressed, my Ghostty crashes are not addressed (crash reporter doesn’t work), I don’t even bother looking at the issues anymore, as I know I am not getting the fixes for a long time. And I’m not running a critical piece of productivity software on a nightlies channel!

sgarland 7mo ago
I'm not doubting your personal experience, but I find the crashes you mentioned surprising; I have never once, since v1.0.1, had Ghostty crash. Tbf I use it with tmux, so I'm not exercising some of its capabilities. But with tmux, I have at any given time 5-7 sessions, each with 2-5 windows, some with panes.
- hectormalot 7mo ago
  Datapoint: I’m running nightly now because the latest 1.2 release has a known crash-on-wake bug when disconnecting an external monitor. Accordingly the issue tracker it was fixed months ago, but it’s not in a release. The nightly is stable though. Didn’t realize how may projects use libghostty, will try cmux one of these days.
sam1522 7mo ago
you should try foot terminal, i have been using for the past couple of months and it is quite good

whalesalad 7mo ago

I keep trying it but keep coming back to alacritty on Linux and iterm2 on osx.

p0w3n3d 7mo ago

On the new mac tahoe with rounded corners (which are really frustrating to me), ghostty should add small margin on the bottom, because the font is sometimes renedered on it and letters are cut (rarely but infuriating, when it happens)

gtirloni 7mo ago
Worth posting here: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions

pbjerkeseth 7mo ago

I have a terminal manager project[0] I'm currently using xterm for, but very curious to try libghostty. Have mainly been hesitant because it hasn't been promoted from an internal ghostty dependency (only awareness of the place was from this article by the creator[1]), but from the sounds of it here people are finding it stable enough. Gonna give it a whirl today. [0]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit [1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

gigatexal 7mo ago

Bigger than ghostty is libghostty which enables things like: https://www.cmux.dev/ https://www.cmux.dev/

operatingthetan 7mo ago
I tried it when it last had an HN post (a week ago?) and found it to be very buggy and went straight back to Ghostty.
- gigatexal 7mo ago
  what bugs did you hit? I have been using it a few days now no issues.
  - operatingthetan 7mo ago
    When I had 3 or more panes open one of them would freeze and be not recoverable without quitting the app. That's a deal killer when I'm trying to run 2 or 3 agents.
    - gigatexal 7mo ago
      I’ll try that at work tomorrow. Interesting corner case. I wonder why it happens.
      - gigatexal 7mo ago
        I had no crashes it just takes ages to resize with cmd + or -
AdrienBrault 7mo ago
Very happy after a few days switching from ghostty to cmux

JCattheATM 7mo ago

Curious to hear some more recommendations, I settled on using lxterminal which works well enough. I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did, kitty doesn't support tabs and ghosttty sounds like it has issues with ssh connections? I feel like I tried most at some point but if anyone has suggestions for a tabbed terminal emulator nicer than lxterminal, ideally with transparency, I'd love to hear them.

TehCorwiz 7mo ago
As a counterpoint to Ghostty ssh. I have literally never had an issue and I manage a large cluster of boxes that run everything from centos 7 to rocky 10. All from ghostty on a Mac.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 7mo ago
  If you don't mind, can you share your config?

am17an 7mo ago

Damn I’m jealous that they figured out how to pay their contributors. I’ve been toiling away for free

big-chungus4 7mo ago

Bro randomly decides to post a link to ghosty docs and gets 275 points

mkl 7mo ago
Submission upvotes don't count nearly as much as comment upvotes in terms of points.
sam1522 7mo ago
Yeah, i have been using foot so far as i found ghostty and warp terminals too much memory consuming

signorovitch 7mo ago

My only issue with ghostty is it isn’t immediately recognized by some programs through ssh (eg less) and they don’t operate properly. However there’s a one liner that solves the problem permanently on the remote machine[0] so it isn’t too bad. Hopefully in the near future ghostty’s terminfo will be shipped with common linux distros. [0] https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

dmix 7mo ago
I haven't used ghostty but terminal having issues with ssh sounds like a major oversight.
oofbey 7mo ago
I find this docs page fairly hilarious. Complaining about how the rest of the world is in the stone ages, and that is why ghostty doesn’t work with it. For me, a terminal program that requires me to muck with every machine I log into to get it to work is pretty horrible. I connect to a lot of different machines every work dat. Often they’re not machines I maintain. Making that harder is exactly the opposite of what I want from a key tool like a terminal program.
- cbushko 7mo ago
  All of those terminals work for you now because someone went and added terminfo to ncurses which distributed it across all versions of linux. Kitty needed to do it too back in 2018. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00005.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ncurses/2018-09/msg00... Note: Ghostty follows the same pattern as Kitty where they a) use their own terminfo, b) distribute it when ssh'ing (it gets pushed to the remote server) and c) added it to ncurses so that it will eventually go away.
randusername 7mo ago
Apparently changing $TERM from `screen-256color` to `tmux-256color` in tmux to try and get italics working in nvim totally mangled ghostty. I looked into infocmp and other tricks to try and and figure out why the backspace key was throwing gibberish around, but I had no interest in debugging such an inscrutable thing through so many layers. I don't fault ghostty for things like this, but at the same time it's hard not to scorn the tools you want to be invisible, even if making unreasonable demands of them on accident.

eoskx 7mo ago

Tried Ghostty several times and I really appreciate the font rendering, but I keep going back to iTerm2 and Terminal.app mostly because of lack of scroll back & CMD-F, etc. Looking forward to what is coming in the next release.

jbrooks84 7mo ago

Why use this over iterm 2?

ashton314 7mo ago
Ghostty is extremely performant. I had a bug in some concurrent software; when I added logging the bug would disappear because the threads acquiring the lock on STDERR was sufficient to make the bug go away. On Ghostty this happened fast enough that I was able to reproduce the bug. Maybe I should have been writing everything to a file. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, I didn’t think of it at the time and Ghostty saved me.

Acur 7mo ago

Really nice terminal. Unfortunately scrolling in terminal apps via mouse wheel seems to be broken (on release and main branch), which is currently a blocker for me. Hope this will be fixed soon.

lukaslalinsky 7mo ago

What kind of features am I missing if I just use GNOME Terminal?

veqq 7mo ago
The biggest boon is that it's a development target for making TUIs etc. App developers get the most benefit out of it.

wateralien 7mo ago

Can't use it yet because I need cmd-f find.

vermon 7mo ago

I've been following this before it was made public and I'm a big Zig fan so I would definitely switch to this, but I've tried and failed many times. Currently it just keeps crashing multiple times (on three different machines) each day on my mac and the quick terminal doesn't support full screen mode (it still shows the menu bar). I could live with the menu bar showing, but because of the constant crashing I'll wait for a bit and check back in a few months.

yomismoaqui 7mo ago

The fetishization of tools is one of the things that mark a dilettante mindset. You see it on all hobbies, e.g. when the someone sees a photograph and their first question is about what camera and optics were used. No question about composition, light, the moment, creativity... they only care for the tools. The technique and knowledge is the important thing, not the tools. They forget the good practitioner can do a great photo with a $200 phone than they with the best Canon DSLR. I have seen this in all hobbies I have practiced, be it musical instruments, kolinsky brushes on miniature painting, montain bikers, running apparell... As I'm getting older I care less about editors, terminals, Linux distros... and after seeing what can be done with agentic coding tools less so.

shimman 7mo ago
I don't feel like this is a fair argument because different tools help different workflows. Since there is always a continuous growth of new people learning new things, it would make sense that tools change over time. Especially in a realm that is digital, not physical. FWIW once I found my workflow (vim + tmux) I stopped caring so much about chasing "new" tools. Now have the luxury to wait 3-5 years and see what's worth adopting, most of it isn't only because I already found a workflow that works for me; but if you're new or still finding what works best, you'll always be experimenting.
- guerrilla 7mo ago
  Dude we are literally talking about a single text box in a window in this case.
  - shimman 7mo ago
    Yes and people feel very strongly about this text box. Some people like multiple text boxes, others just like one single text box.
    - guerrilla 7mo ago
      Those people should focus more on not writing such absurdly bloated software instead.

rothific 7mo ago

Feature request: renaming tabs! Helps keep tabs organized instead of 20 tabs with similar names. (See Zed for example) Also! I'm considering Ghostty web (https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web) for my project Ink Web. It's awesome that Ghostty can work in the browser to replace xterm.js. https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1 https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1 Project: https://www.ink-web.dev/ https://www.ink-web.dev/

WhereIsTheTruth 7mo ago

I can't find an alternative to Terminator, being able to drag and drop panels to create layouts is such a strong workflow that it's very hard to give up I did give Ghostty a try, the turn off was Adwaita, the tablet UI for the tabs and context menu.. i just can't

submeta 7mo ago

Ghostty is fast and feels native, but WezTerm occupies a different niche: it's a terminal you program rather than configure. The Lua config isn't just "dynamic" in the abstract sense. I built a tmuxinator-style workspace manager that spawns project-specific layouts - named tabs, splits, working directories, startup commands - from a fuzzy launcher. Session state auto-saves every 10 minutes with timestamped snapshots and crash recovery. Theme toggling between dark and light mode triggers a system-wide theme switch script. These are runtime behaviors, not static settings - try doing any of that in TOML. The built-in multiplexer is the other major differentiator. Splits, directional navigation, pane zoom, pane selection with alphabet overlays, moving panes between tabs or windows, all without a tmux prefix key. It's not just "WezTerm has splits too, it's that the interaction model is fundamentally more fluid when there's no mode switching. WezTerm isn't trying to be the fastest terminal. It's trying to be the most programmable one, and for people who want their terminal to work as a development environment rather than a PTY renderer, that tradeoff is worth it.

thepancake 7mo ago

[flagged]

sponno 7mo ago

Loving how well Ghostty works and looks. When running several Projects I need quite a few tabs as all these AI agents take sometime to complete. Overhead tabs get real messy very quickly. Multiple windows become a nightmare quickly. Side bar tabs have been my solution. I love iTerms sidebar tabs - I add emojis to mine for my key projects and any subtask just lives under the master tab like a folder. Would love to see sidebar tabs - or it sounds like I can code my own.

HatchedLake721 7mo ago
Ghostty with sidebars and more https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux

MajorBee 7mo ago

While I quite liked Ghostty to being with, the lack of a scripting API quickly drove me to WezTerm before long. See: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353 I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important to my personal git worktree ergonomics.

ionwake 7mo ago

Ive been using Ghostty after AI recommended it for lightweight claude sessions. No complaints been happy using it for my claude swarms for about a month

cwel 7mo ago

Ghostty is awesome, ill echo the sentiment regarding lack of IPC/scripting API being my current hold back. Sticking with kitty til then. I still keep the ghostty binary on hand so I can +boo :^) for libghostty consumers, favorite i've tried so far is neurosnap/zmx.

dang 7mo ago

These look like the major past threads (in reverse order) - have I missed any? AI Usage Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 - Jan 2026 (273 comments) Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568794 - Jan 2026 (138 comments) Why users cannot create Issues directly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 - Jan 2026 (310 comments) Ghostty is now non-profit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138238 - Dec 2025 (289 comments) Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110842 - Dec 2025 (115 comments) Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 - Oct 2025 (147 comments) Ghostty 1.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252026 - Sept 2025 (26 comments) AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568 - Aug 2025 (464 comments) We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905808 - Aug 2025 (224 comments) Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930 - Jan 2025 (79 comments) Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 - Dec 2024 (55 comments) Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 - Dec 2024 (7 comments) Ghostty 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 - Dec 2024 (681 comments) Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments)

Newuser6923 7mo ago

This is a test comment

mastabadtomm 7mo ago

We often see Ghostty on the front page. What makes this project special? Is it solving a big problem with current terminal apps?

nout 7mo ago
In my experience it actually is. I went through multiple terminals and they all had issues for me (missing key remapping functionality, slowness, not working across platforms, UI ugly...), but Ghostty is solving most of these.

jfkimmes 7mo ago

Funny, I was just configuring ghostty. I finally made the jump in order to get rid of tmux as a layer of indirection. Here's what I landed on: This config tries to emulate as much of tmux with native ghostty features (splits and tabs). https://codeberg.org/jfkimmes/dotfiles/src/branch/master/ghostty.conf https://codeberg.org/jfkimmes/dotfiles/src/branch/master/gho...

qudat 7mo ago
Add https://zmx.sh https://zmx.sh into the mix for detach/attach functionality. It uses libghostty for rehydrating session state and scrollback

orsorna 7mo ago

I've only ever stuck with urxvt and more recently foot since moving to Wayland. On Mac the default terminal works for me, though I've been using Ghostty to follow a trend, but I seriously don't understand the benefits netted to me? (other than the cool icon)

commandersaki 7mo ago
I stayed with Terminal.app for quite awhile. Until very recently (not when Ghostty was released) it didn't have 24-bit colour support. It also didn't have shell integrations such as triple click to select all output of the last command. The configuration system is arse and is kind of a lock-in as it is in all plist form, so I had a hard time extracting the colours I used for my terminal and using them elsewhere. Now that they've updated it recently, it is a better terminal, but otherwise Ghostty has a few bells and whistles that make the experience nicer.

jovial_cavalier 7mo ago

why does everyone freak out about this terminal whenever it's posted?

brcmthrowaway 7mo ago

How much of ghostty is written by Claude?

lambdas 7mo ago
Mitchell Hashimoto doesn’t need LLM’s, LLM’s need Mitchell Hashimoto
- rafamvc 7mo ago
  This was a great interview but Mitchell: https://youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU https://youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU He covers his LLM uses too! Highly recommend, and Mitchell thoughts on open source inspired me to start contributing to projects outside of my common experience.
- KingMob 7mo ago
  Ewww, hero worship.
  - lambdas 7mo ago
    I was more getting at the angle that when people say things like “Wow, I asked AI to code a terminal emulator and it got it mostly right!”, it’s not because the LLM is amazingly smart only by inference, it’s been trained on the appropriated code of individuals like the above.

danhergir 7mo ago

I've used Ghostty in the past, but nowadays it's hard to use it since you have to take in count that running agents requires using tmux sessions which is something Ghostty does not support very well

guerrilla 7mo ago

How is it possible that this thing constantly gets so much hype? It's a terminal emulator.

jorams 7mo ago
It helps a bit that it's written in Zig, but its primary differentiating feature in the sea of terminal emulators is that it's created by mitchellh, who is kind of a celebrity in some circles.
- TheFlyingFish 7mo ago
  He's living the hacker dream. Made a billion bucks, then went right back to writing code. People upvote because they wish they were him.
KingMob 7mo ago
Beats me. Its hype is all out of proportion to its features. Maybe this is why the creator is touting the use of libghostty, the underlying library.

Sophira 7mo ago

I've never quite understood why terminal emulators nowadays have GPU acceleration. They've not been slow for a long time. What am I missing?

hoherd 7mo ago
If you compare them side by side, you actually can see how slow some of them are. The way I compare is to open them all up tiled on my display joined to the same tmux session, then try doing heavy redraw operations, like maybe cmatrix. You can clearly see how some of them are quick at redrawing, and some are not. Some people do not care about the difference, but it is definitely there. See also https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/
cactusplant7374 7mo ago
I've commented on this before. Sign of the times. People like anything related to GPUs. In my personal coding projects I've even been tempted to ask the agent: "What features can I add that use the GPU?"

dayone1 7mo ago

Is there a windows equivalent to what Ghostty is? Windows Terminal is really slow

whitten 7mo ago

Does ghostty support single duplex ? I couldn’t find out. Also, does it support visible control characters ? EXACT EMULATION ? 3270 ? VT-105 ? VT-220 ? VT-320 ? VT-420 ? SIXEL ? NAPLPS ?

zerebos 7mo ago

Bit of a shameless plug, but for those looking to configure Ghostty using an actual GUI, you can use this web tool I've been maintaining since the original closed beta of Ghostty https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config

RulerOf 7mo ago
Thank you for dropping this link. I opened ghostty for the first same, then when preferences dropped me into a TUI editor with no syntax highlighting I closed it and reopened iTerm. I liked the idea of a fast new terminal, but not enough to RTFM before figuring out if it was worth switching.

xannabxlle 7mo ago

Speaking of foot, are you going to do a client server architecture for instant terminal setup? Foot instances start up very fast due to this

kjsingh 7mo ago

I started using ghostty coz I needed different terminals for all those AI agents. E.g. with MacOS terminal, I launch Claude, with Ghostty, I launch opencode, with Attyx I launch pi

kelvinjps10 7mo ago

For people that use it and have used kitty, how do you find it better? I don't want to be pedantic or anything I just want to know if I'm missing out, I installed some time ago but didn't find anything really interesting

_giorgio_ 7mo ago

I haven't tried Ghostty yet, but for a windows user the combo: wt.exe https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=US https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=U... pwsh.exe https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/install-powershell-on-windows https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta... is really powerful, it has finally driven me away from conemu, which was really bad with claude (lots of fonts problems).

purpleredrose 7mo ago

Serious question here, not trolling. Ghostty looks great; obviously a lot of hard work went into it. My question is why? I am seriously curious about what motivated you to make this considering the space is already so crowded with reasonable solutions. I see this kind of almost duplication of effort a lot, and I am really interested in what motivates people to undertake these kind of projects.

purpleredrose 7mo ago
Still curious
sumedh 7mo ago
Why do you need a new search engine called Google when you have Yahoo Search, Ask Jeeves etc. People do it because they care about some X factor, maybe they dont like that most existing terminals are slow and they want to build a better product.

threekindwords 7mo ago

ghostty has extensive shader support and claude knows how to write shaders... i was tired of staring at boring black rectangles all day... so i built a shader that fills the background with slow-moving color gradients. every window gets its own palette that drifts over an hour. i think it's beautiful without being distracting. thank you mitchell and contributors for implementing and supporting animated shaders! thank you to the folks who have shared their shader code in public so i could build this! it was so much fun to make and i use it everywhere https://github.com/mfelix/chromadrift https://github.com/mfelix/chromadrift stay gold, shine bright

7e 7mo ago

This project makes me wish item were faster, because it’s way more useable.

dbgrman 7mo ago

Love the product. Have you considered implementing panes and windows that work with tmux’s CC mode? Any considerations specifically for claude code or agentic terminal users?

bmn__ 7mo ago

> Ghostty is […] feature-rich […] uses platform-native UI What goes through the head of a developer when writing such blatant lies in the introduction text? What does he think he accomplishes by doing so? Is he so deluded that he thinks behaviour like this is somehow socially acceptable and the readers just nod along and no one is going notice and criticise him for that? Really, it's like the mind of children in an adult body, no concept of reputational damage. I just installed Ghostty and cannot help but conclude that the claims are wrong, abundantly so. Compare it with the incumbent Konsole. It is clear to anyone to see that Ghostty has about 0.3% of its features. If I were to enumerate everything that's missing, I would not be able to stop until tomorrow. It suffices to point out that there is no menu bar, no icon toolbar, no l10n, no settings dialogue, no key-bindings dialogue, no scrollbar, no search, and it would go on and on and on. The sad thing is, if the developer actually used the platform-native UI like he claims, then he would instantly get the first five without lifting a finger!

intaek 7mo ago

I made a simple TUI Ghostty config manager called Ghofig. Try it out. https://github.com/intaek-h/ghofig https://github.com/intaek-h/ghofig

mjcarden 7mo ago

Installed the snap on Ubuntu 24.04 and when I used it to look at /etc/sudoers.d/README, it emitted: WARNING: terminal is not fully functional Press RETURN to continue ...which I thought a little odd.