[HN Gopher] Ghostty - Terminal Emulator
___________________________________________________________________
Ghostty - Terminal Emulator
Author : oli5679
Score : 552 points
Date : 2026-03-01 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ghostty.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ghostty.org)
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| 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/
|
| WezTerm is also a strong contender:
|
| https://wezterm.org/
| anta40 wrote:
| Wezterms is certainly nice. I guess they haven't release
| another update? Currently stick to iTerm2.
| pkage wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| mkl wrote:
| I regularly select hundreds of lines in Wezterm. I have never
| had a problem.
| dbgrman wrote:
| i hope they implement something that can be used with tmux -CC
| mode.
| selfawareMammal wrote:
| Why is it in the main page? It's a super well-known project no?
| dewey wrote:
| Because someone thought it was interesting, and enough other
| people upvoted it.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Just because you know about it doesn't mean others can't
| benefit from the mention.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| mberning wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
| baby wrote:
| Looking at the comments it seems like there are still people
| not using it
| lomlobon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| 0sdi wrote:
| Nerve signals yes. I just try them side by side, usually
| running vim on both terminals and measuring how it feels.
| If you can feel difference, the latency is bad.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| According to this (at least 11 months old) benchmark, Ghostty
| has the worst input latency across all contenders:
| https://github.com/moktavizen/terminal-benchmark?tab=readme-...
|
| More benchmarks from 4 months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45253927
|
| 14 months old discussion of input latency in Ghostty with
| comments from the author: https://github.com/ghostty-
| org/ghostty/discussions/4837
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I don't type more than 100 characters a second so I've never
| ran into bits limits.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| If you're typing just one character per second you'll still
| feel the difference. Latency is stress inducing.
| forty wrote:
| I have been using computers and terminal for a long time, and
| this kind of comment makes me think I must have missed a whole
| bunch of things which can be done with a terminal
| kccqzy wrote:
| Since people are mentioning latency I'll mention throughput.
| Basically the idea is that you accidentally cat a large file to
| your terminal and we are measuring how much time it takes for
| the terminal to finish displaying it. This test generally
| favors GPU-accelerated terminals.
|
| Ghostty performs very well on this regard, among the same
| league as Alacritty and Ptyxis.
| kazinator wrote:
| Rather, what will win is a terminal that internally builds an
| efficient, _symbolic_ representation of what is on the
| display, rather than a pixel representation with all the font
| glyph, and which efficiently sychronizes that symbolic
| representation to the graphical canvas, skipping intermediate
| updates when the abstract display is changing too fast.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's already happening I think. Newer terminals redraw at
| a fixed rate equal to the display refresh rate, usually
| 60Hz. But if there are more than 60 new characters being
| printed per second, some of these intermediate states are
| never rendered on screen.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Have you tried kitty with more aggressive settings? It feels
| very responsive out of the box, but the defaults are balanced
| for sane energy use on portable machines.
| repaint_delay 5 input_delay 1 sync_to_monitor no
| baby wrote:
| I use it but have people trier cmux?
| dwedge wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Or the manual, which describes the features for automatically
| handling it.
| dwedge wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is a bug.. But not with Ghostty...
| dwedge wrote:
| What do you think the bug is, exactly?
| nout wrote:
| Servers throwing "missing or unsuitable terminal" even
| when the connecting terminal is available and very
| suitable. And this is just because they hardcode xterm as
| the "standard".
| hijinks wrote:
| i had to do this for ssh
|
| host * SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color
| frereubu wrote:
| https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I definitely have had to poke at things a bit, even where
| they "should" work. I use salt in my homelab and eventually
| got the xterm-ghostty.terminfo file and I put it in my
| baseline salt config, then you run 'tic -x xterm-
| ghostty.terminfo'.
| heftig wrote:
| I wish TERM would contain a list of terminal types in
| decreasing order of specificity, like 'ghostty:xterm-256color',
| so a system that doesn't know what ghostty is would fall back
| to xterm-256color, but that ship has sailed long ago.
| paxys wrote:
| I have tried every possible setting but SSH ends up breaking
| more often than not. As opposed to iTerm which just works.
| Jare wrote:
| Same here. I have a Ghostty often open but end up using
| iTerm2 for pretty much everything. It's not just having to
| hack the TERM (which I ended up doing), it's that sometimes
| something about the TERM internally breaks anyway and I'm
| back to seeing ESC codes when I press an arrow. Quit &
| restart fixes it but it's just enough friction to keep me
| away.
| mitchellh wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think you're looking for the `toggle_split_zoom` binding
| which has existed since Ghostty 1.0 and is default bound to
| `cmd+shift+enter` on macOS which is the same binding as iTerm.
| It's also visible in the menu and command palette.
|
| We recently added a kind of split title bar, making it double
| click to zoom is a good idea. I'll add an issue for that to the
| roadmap.
| dwedge wrote:
| I could have sworn I checked every menu option but it is
| there, thank you
| znpy wrote:
| Can I take advantage of you being here and express some
| desiderata?
|
| 1. The quick terminal feature is ghostty's killer feature for
| me, I switched to ghostty because of it. Could we make it
| first-class feature? Like, i'd love to have tabs over there
| too (like in guake/yakuake).
|
| 2. I have a white on black theme (white text on black
| background) but when i split vertically/horizontally, the
| borders between one shell and the next are not really visible
| and I have an hard time resizing them... Can you do something
| about it? Setting the colors of borders would be an okay fix
| for me.
| jcgl wrote:
| > The quick terminal feature is ghostty's killer feature
| for me
|
| Just FYI, it's in Kitty nowadays too:
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-
| termina.... The quick-access terminal is a regular
| terminal, so you get normal tabs, splits, etc. there.
| computerfriend wrote:
| 2. I think split-divider-color does what you want.
| dagi3d wrote:
| also, from not that long time ago, you can change the focus
| of panes and you can tell it to respect the zoom state if you
| want, which is super convenient
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I don't know enough about these things to know why, but I have
| pretty much always had to hack $TERM to get things working
| smoothly with any remotely featureful terminal emulator. I have
| occasionally needed similar hacks for Kitty and urxvt, for
| example (though top and ncdu seem to work fine).
|
| The way terminal applications handle different terminal
| emulators on Linux just seems to be a bit broken. I don't think
| it's a particular indictment of Ghostty or any one emulator.
| dwedge wrote:
| I just checked Kitty and top fails on Debian 12, so I think I
| was unfair in just calling out Ghostty for this
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| It sounds like you simply forgot to update your terminfo on
| your remote system.
|
| You must do this if your chosen terminal requires settings that
| are not compatible with "xterm-256color".
|
| Alacritty, kitty, and wezterm also require this, as they
| implement features that xterm doesn't (and most likely never
| will), if your terminfo DB is too old to already include them.
|
| Using Alacritty as an example, you'd take a file that looks
| like this,
| https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/blob/master/extra/ala...
| , and run `tic -x -o "~/.terminfo" "that.info"` on it.
|
| Its been this way for like 30 years, and it'll never change.
| dwedge wrote:
| It might be a bug in remote handling and I might have
| unfairly called out GhostTTY for this, but "forgetting to
| update terminfo on my remote system" just doesn't hold with
| the way I work.
|
| I work managing different systems for different clients and
| often login to systems for the first time. The servers aren't
| mine, and configuring something like Ansible to configure my
| home just seems like a waste of time for little benefit. It
| means that generally I end up using systems that are likely
| to be already instead - Bash not zsh, Perl, basic vim without
| any bindings. It might sound special but I'm sure I'm far
| from the only person working this way.
|
| So given this, I'd always prefer a terminal that doesn't
| require me to change remote servers. In this particular case
| I can modify $TERM in my local .zshrc and it works fine so
| it's a moot point, but if I had to modify the remote system
| it would be a no go.
| arccy wrote:
| you could also stick this in ssh config, generally makes
| terminals work with ancient systems...:
| SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color
| dwedge wrote:
| Ancient systems like Debian 12?
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Ghostty did not submit their terminfo to the database
| until the Dec 30th 2025 release of ncurses 6.6.
|
| Any distro older than this does not include Ghostty by
| default.
|
| Alacritty was added in the Feb 2020 release, as well as
| Kitty. Wezterm was added in the April 2024 release.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| If you have to configure the host to support the client
| rather than the client supporting unknown existing hosts,
| then what you have is a terminal, not a terminal emulator.
|
| In 1970 all terminals were their own thing, tied to a single
| host somewhere in the same building by a dedicated serial
| cable. The terminal didn't move or connect to random other
| hosts, and the host had to be specially configured to work
| with any terminal connected to it.
|
| Since then, a few terminal definitions have become
| standardized across all hosts for decades, and terminals are
| _emulators_ that _emulate_ one of those 40 year established
| standard definitions, because today terminals connect to
| countless unknown new random and varied hosts that the
| terminal user didn 't install and configure before
| connecting, and may not even have the admin rights to do so
| after the fact either, and even if they do, it's wildly and
| inexcusably awful to require that.
|
| It's entirely backwards for a terminal today to default to
| asserting it's own new $TERM, and to characterize the
| problems caused by this as "the user forgot to do this
| totally unreasonable thing" that no other terminal or
| _terminal emulator_ has required for 40 years.
|
| It's 100% a bug. The fact that it's intentional just means
| it's a design goal bug.
| pants2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I have Ghostty 1.2.3 and it STILL does not have cmd+F find.
| saberience wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I expected this to point to the 1.3.0 release since it's expected
| in March. Hopefully we get that soon.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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.
| leetrout wrote:
| Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I'll wait for the stable release and will retest it. Not in a
| rush and not the early adopter kind of guy.
| davidkunz wrote:
| Give it "a week or two"
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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?
| macmccann wrote:
| 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
| CoderJoshDK wrote:
| Scrollback does exist on Ghostty! But you need to switch to
| "tip". This can be done in the config file. The tip build is
| very stable and has many bugs fixed (like various memory
| leaks).
| PolCPP wrote:
| Does it work all the time? I'm using tip and had scrollback
| stop working after a long ssh session.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Tip is good but depending on your platform you might need to
| build it yourself and then you need a particular zig version.
| intothemild wrote:
| Personally kitty is the only one I keep coming back too. Mostly
| because it's very customisable, fast, lean, ligatures, separate
| font for italics, great macro support, and supports automatic
| tiling panes.
| Crisco wrote:
| I wouldn't say I love tmux, but I have a configuration file
| that I put on every computer I use regularly that is very
| comfortable for me. I basically live in the terminal across
| many different machines, and having the same interface for
| managing panes and tabs even when using ssh is invaluable.
|
| I also use vim (well neovim) as my primary editor, and have set
| up tmux to integrate well with it, so that might contribute to
| my appreciation and continued usage of it.
| nickjj wrote:
| Yep, I've been using tmux for almost 10 years. Its config has
| followed me across every terminal I've used in Windows with
| WSL 2, macOS (work laptop) and native Linux. It's a nice
| abstraction over getting split panes, windows (tabs),
| sessions, search, scroll back, consistent key binds and the
| overall theme to work the same across environments.
| homebrewer wrote:
| If you spend any amount of time on remote machines with
| unreliable connections, local tmux is insta-reject because
| tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient. As with GP, it's also
| why I don't consider terminal emulators without tabs at all.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient.
|
| Hitting c-b c-b isn't that inconvenient?
| NateEag wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I hold Control and double-tap b for managing the remote
| session, then everything else is the same.
|
| Granted, I'm not a power user, so there may be numbers
| that get frustrating. I could imagine complex splits
| getting confusing (I don't use splits at all).
| nine_k wrote:
| C-b is less ergonomic than C-a that is the default on GNU
| screen. The first thing in tmux is to remap to C-a.
| (Triply so if you remap caps lock to ctrl.)
| binsquare wrote:
| Yep same, I install ohmytmux and I'm ready to go.
| jcgl wrote:
| > Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.
|
| Maybe worth another look at then? I'm far from a Kitty power
| user, but it does pretty much everything else I want it to,
| including working as a quake-style terminal[0]. And you can
| extend it with kittens[1] if you so desire. Also, the next
| release should presumably include smooth scrolling[2] which I'm
| quite looking forward to.
|
| Maybe more than any one feature though, I appreciate the hard
| work that Kovid (the creator of Kitty) has done to tastefully
| add new VT standards and try to make terminals as useful as
| they can be in the 21st century.
|
| [0] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/quick-access-
| termina...
|
| [1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens_intro/
|
| [2] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/pull/9330
| homebrewer wrote:
| Kitty is the best one. It has several features which have
| proven so useful I wasn't able to stay on anything else for
| more than a couple of hours (including the one this topic is
| about).
|
| Ctrl+Shift+G wraps the output of the previous command into a
| pager (say, less). You often only know you needed a pager
| after that output is printed.
|
| Ctrl+Shift+E highlights all links on the current screen and
| assigns short alphanumeric codes to them, so you can open
| links without using the mouse. For example, `Ctrl+Shift+E 1`
| opens the first link, `.. 2` the second one, etc.
|
| Ctrl+Shift+U opens symbol search where you can find & insert
| symbols using their unicode names. Emoji, TUI blocks, rare
| accented characters you need once in a blue moon, CJK
| ideographs, whatever.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Kitty is the GOAT terminal
| idoubtit wrote:
| I'm not the GP, but I do remember why I rejected Kitty when I
| tried several terminal emulators last years: it broke quite a
| few of my workflows.
|
| For instance, in vim the F3 key was broken[^1]. It was very
| surprising and weird, and a portable workaround required some
| arcane vim configuration.
|
| Another important pain point was that the font rendering was
| different in Kitty to any other app, and very dependent on
| the screen DPI. IIRC, for a DPI around 100, I had to switch
| to "legacy rendering" because the default rendering was
| barely readable.
|
| I also remember issues with SSH. And Kitty crashed at least
| once. And I wasn't a fan of Kitty's mix of C and Python.
| After a week or two of usage, my Kitty config file was big,
| with an extra hundred lines of Python for the tabbar. Despite
| some nice features (like the shortcut to put the output of
| the last command into a file), I got uneasy with all this
| mess. I tried Ghostty, which was as good as Kitty with much
| less oddities.
|
| [^1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/13328
| nine_k wrote:
| Kitty is great, but its author has very strong opinions,
| strongly held; this keeps a number of popular requests
| summarily rejected. In particular, there is no way to color
| plain bold text, which is possible in basically any other
| emulator. This is a deal-breaker for me personally, it makes
| reading e.g. man pages unnecessarily hard.
|
| WezTerm is a very good replacement.
| mbrumlow wrote:
| > author has very strong opinions.
|
| So true. To the point I have to maintain my own fork to
| make the command key my meta
| dbdr wrote:
| > Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for
| the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux.
|
| Another option is to leave the tabbing to your window manager.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Cool, but I'm 100% clueless as to how. Haven't migrated to
| Linux yet and this one of the next important items for me to
| learn.
| loeg wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone else mention Terminology yet. It uses an
| unconventional GUI framework (Enlightenment / EFL), but that
| aside, it's fast and has more or less all of the features you'd
| expect of a terminal:
|
| https://github.com/borisfaure/terminology
|
| Its "moment" as a new novel terminal was over a decade ago, but
| it still chugs on working just fine. Notably(?), gregkh uses it
| (or used to use it):
|
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/greg-kroah-hartman...
| cess11 wrote:
| Back in 2018 I thought it felt kind of sluggish and consumed
| quite a bit of resources, but looked pretty. Have they
| improved on performance since then?
| loeg wrote:
| Are you sure you're thinking of the same terminal? Its
| standout feature has been performance. Granted, that was
| 10+ years ago, but I've never noticed it regressing.
| everforward wrote:
| I like tmux because it does more than tabs in an emulator. I
| can detach from a session on a remote host to leave a process
| running after I disconnect, or to pick the session back up on
| another PC.
|
| I do use tabs rather than repeatedly switching tmux sessions,
| but I do end up running tmux for splitting the GUI into side by
| side layouts.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Detaching is working just fine with `screen` as well.
|
| I like the idea of tmux but as another poster suggested, I
| prefer to just get better at my window manager to achieve
| similar results. tmux requires way too many key presses for
| me.
| pkulak wrote:
| Foot is worth a look. It's the only terminal I've ever seen
| that starts up in sub-50ms cold, without a service already
| running.
|
| But you do have to run a proper window manager so you don't
| have to require tab support in every single app. ;)
| jen20 wrote:
| You can search scroll back on Ghostty nightly. I switched
| straight from iTerm2 (after 20 years of iTerm), but _do_
| remember the reason I rejected Kitty: it has a ton of Python in
| it, which is usually indicative of software which is going to
| be a pain in the ass.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Tabs usually mean mouse+click to switch which takes way more
| effort that a simple alt+number or similar keybinding used to
| switch "tabs" in tmux. I'd guess that some terminal emulator
| tabs allow keybindings to switch tabs as well but, modelling
| OP, I'm focusing on the expected default experience.
| pdimitar wrote:
| No, zero mouse usage, you can both address each tab by number
| and just moving between them. I wouldn't have any terminal
| emulator without the latter feature at least, and all I've
| tried support it.
|
| I hate mixed mouse + keyboard workflows as well.
| conception wrote:
| SecureCRT is a paid program I've used for years and it's just
| so comprehensive. It's not cheap but the quality shows.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Kitty has poor security
|
| https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084
| kombine wrote:
| If there wasn't kitty I'd definitely be using Ghostty, but I have
| no reason to switch.
| bArray wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sideeffffect wrote:
| 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-defo...
|
| I can't recommend 0xProto enough, the only thing I'm sorry
| about is that I didn't find it sooner :)
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Going to give this one a try; I'm still partial to Atkinson
| hyper legible, but this one looks fun.
| mitchellh wrote:
| 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 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
|
| 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
| 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 wrote:
| Now that Ghostty is part of a real org, is there any way people
| can sponsor specific features/bugfixes? I've been waiting for
| drag/drop to be working on KDE before I make the switch, and
| I'd be happy to pay for a fix.
| oDot wrote:
| I'm the author of Trolley[0] (Electron for TUIs).
|
| It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with
| `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality
| around it.
|
| Thanks for making it.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Thanks for all the work you do! I had used terminal just a few
| dozen times before November -- and now i am in terminal more
| than any app (even more than the web browser).
|
| It's common for me to have 15-25 different terminal windows
| open for using Claude code. I shifted to Ghostty because I was
| looking for more features.
|
| Unfortunately, none of the features I wanted are available
| anywhere (though I've come to appreciate Ghostty anyway).
| Here's what I had wanted:
|
| 1. Basic text editing features (ie click to place cursor in the
| text input field; highlight to delete)
|
| 2. Change colors or fonts mid session (to make it easier to
| find particular windows)
|
| 3. Window management and search (eg, a way to find my windows
| when I lose them and to otherwise control them)
|
| Apparently, it is really hard to develop features like these
| for terminal emulators. I'd love to understand why...
| stonegray wrote:
| IMO this isn't the job of the emulator. You can do this all
| in `tmux` for example.
|
| As for editing text, ghostty+tmux most definitely supports
| editing text with the mouse (even an in terminal right click
| menu!) although sounds like your intended use of select to
| delete isn't common so you'll need to do some customizations.
| yearolinuxdsktp wrote:
| I've been using scroll back search for 15+ years with
| Terminal.app and iTerm2, and there's no way that's not the
| job of the terminal. You don't know how good that is until
| you use it.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| What am I missing?
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Tmux does it better
| yeison wrote:
| +1
| jcgl wrote:
| What makes you say that isn't the job the emulator? Sure it
| is. In fact, tmux itself _is_ a terminal emulator that you
| just so happen to run inside of another terminal emulator
| that you want to multiplex.
| nevon wrote:
| The next release includes a way to use a command palette to
| search for and jump between surfaces (windows, panes), which
| sounds like it partially addresses your third point. I had a
| small hand in it, by building the initial UI for the Linux
| version.
| harr01 wrote:
| For 1, take a look at https://github.com/alex-903/zsh-mouse-
| and-flex-search. It runs as a zle-line-init hook, so it works
| in any terminal. A full terminal app implementation would be
| cleaner, however.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Mitchell,
|
| What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a
| huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I
| remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the
| lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need
| people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny
| considering I regularly hear people say they are in the
| terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!
| txdv wrote:
| Once he fixes the past he will have more time to fix the
| future
| pkulak wrote:
| Wait, really? So I've used the terminal for everything for
| decades, and now, because of vibe coding, all The Kids have
| joined me? I don't even know how to feel about that. Better
| terminals are nice though.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Right? It's been kind of funny watching everyone
| "rediscover" the terminal and I'm over here feeling like a
| true graybeard "silly kids, I've been here the whole time."
|
| What's old is new again is apparently just as true in tech
| as it is in fashion.
| rvz wrote:
| It's because the web developers who destroyed the web are
| now taking their mess with them into more obscure places,
| such as terminals, hardware and AI.
|
| That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Embrace, Embellish, Enshittify.
| james_marks wrote:
| The terminal was _always awesome_, the bar to realized
| that was just a tad high for many people. Until now!
| pizza wrote:
| here-doc usage has probably 100x-ed in the last year
| lovecg wrote:
| Yeah it's been amusing to see people rediscovering tmux as
| well
| chrysoprace wrote:
| I think terminal workflows are intimidating for a lot of
| people, because the discoverability is lower than GUIs. You
| can't necessarily intuit how a CLI works, you have to read
| the documentation or watch a tutorial, which my 10 years in
| the IT industry has taught me a big barrier even for really
| experienced SWEs. The new coding TUIs are a more gentle
| introduction to that.
| robinwhg wrote:
| He was on a podcast recently where he talked about that a
| little. It's on Youtube.
| mitchellh wrote:
| Overall I would describe it as "amusing."
|
| If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would
| _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having
| regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding
| companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal
| users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that
| that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've
| laughed even harder.
|
| So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Would a terminal deal with them have added another billion
| to your account if it hadn't been nonprofit?
| nine_k wrote:
| /* Claude Code is the strongest case of the return to the
| mainframe: a closed, bespoke, paid service that nothing
| locally run compares to. Terminals are just a natural part of
| the mainframe world! */
| linhns wrote:
| Hi Mitchell, thanks for creating Ghostty. Been part of my
| workflow ever since I found it. Just a small question, when do
| you see Ghostty can fully replicate iTerm2 popular features
| like output copy/selection?
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Random advice question. My brother taught himself to program
| and has been making a terminal-based game. What started out
| small has turned into a highly polished game with ascii art,
| sound, you name it.
|
| I've been trying to figure out how I could actually help him
| distribute it and I keep coming back to the best option being
| to wrap his programs terminal output into a host process that
| can emulate and render it. It seems that the lib Ghostty might
| be perfect for the former, but not quite yet on the latter?
| bewuethr wrote:
| Maybe as an SSH app? See https://snakes.run for a recent
| example.
| HorizonXP wrote:
| Having incorporated libghostty into my current web-based
| project, I can't say enough thanks. I've lived in the terminal
| since 2003, resisting IDEs, VSCode, everything because I'm a
| die hard Vim + tmux guy. Vibe coding coming back to the
| terminal, and being able to use libghostty to facilitate that
| is a serious vindication of my steadfast resistance to move
| away from the terminal.
|
| I'm sure you feel the same watching Ghostty become what it has.
| Big thank you.
| guiambros wrote:
| Coincidentally I was just listening to your interview with The
| Pragmatic Engineer [1] this morning. Loved hearing the stories
| of early days at HashiCorp, taking it public, and the near-miss
| with VMware.
|
| It also got me wondering how things would be different if you
| haven't crossed paths with the guy who unplugged your mouse :)
| It's fascinating how life is full of these small yet defining
| moments. We don't always appreciate them right away, but
| beautiful to look back.
|
| Thanks for Ghostty! It has been my daily terminal driver for
| the past year.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjckELpzLOU
| wpasc wrote:
| I was also just recommended this interview on youtube.
| honestly it makes sense if the algo decided it was the right
| time to recommend this video and resultantly this post is
| making it's way to front page of HN
| guiambros wrote:
| I subscribe to the channel, so I had already downloaded the
| episode. But glad PE is getting some algorithm-love; it's a
| great channel/podcast. Gergely is a great interviewer.
|
| https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/
| scosman wrote:
| Thanks for your awesome work. Never thought I'd switch to a
| terminal without cmd-f, but ghostty made it worth it. Can't
| wait for v1.3!
| rdtsc wrote:
| I just wanted to say "thank you". I switched to Ghostty over a
| year ago and it's been working out great. It's now my default
| terminal. My favorite features are responsiveness and ease of
| splitting panes.
| danso wrote:
| I literally discovered Ghostty yesterday when googling "best
| terminal macos" and surfaced a ~year-old reddit thread
| recommending it [0]. Just needed something other than Terminal
| so I could Cmd-Tab between distinct command-line work (e.g.
| claude code and ipython tabs). Was nice to find something that
| just worked
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1loiw2z/comment/n0...
| fragmede wrote:
| Fwiw x the program alt-tab on Mac gives macOS a more sane
| alt-tab behavior.
| piperswe wrote:
| Cmd+` is also a useful shortcut for switching between
| windows of the same application
| seertaak wrote:
| Congrats on creating and helming such a cool project!
|
| Out of curiosity, does ghostty do the Quake terminal thing - I
| use yakuake for this, but it feels a bit long in the tooth.
| rkrzr wrote:
| It does. See https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/referenc
| e#toggle_qui...
|
| This works on MacOS, and on Linux sometimes:
|
| > On Linux, the quick terminal is only supported on Wayland
| and not X11, and only on Wayland compositors that support the
| wlr-layer-shell-v1 protocol. In practice, this means that
| only GNOME users would not be able to use this feature.
| veqq wrote:
| > front page
|
| Nice! Looks like I should have rushed the interview. :D
| scuff3d wrote:
| What's it been like managing a fairly large project with Zig? I
| know you've spoken highly of the language in the past, but
| recently it seems like Zig has been through some substantial
| changes that would be relevant to a terminal emulator. I'm
| curious how painful the churn has been for project maintainers.
| mitchellh wrote:
| It's been extremely good. I should really blog about it in
| more detail because I do get asked this question regularly.
| It's been very good.
|
| The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I
| knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well
| worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer
| overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started
| the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs
| make this all way less painful... even though they're not
| trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs,
| and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.
|
| I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it
| hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use
| Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're
| already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been
| good.
|
| I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but
| overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and
| the leadership. All good.
| scuff3d wrote:
| That's super interesting to hear. I see people say all the
| time "oh I would never use it in a big project because it's
| changing so fast", but then see awesome projects like
| Ghostty and Tiger Beatle written in it, so clearly they're
| doing something right.
|
| I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I
| tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way
| too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not
| running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.
| mitchellh wrote:
| Yes, LLMs with Zig are absolutely useless without agentic
| behaviors. Throw an agent in the mix and it's totally
| fine. Bonus points if you pair it with some basic agent
| skills so it knows how to look up language references,
| stdlib files, etc. then it does even better.
| novok wrote:
| Do you get frustrated in using a low training data language
| like zig with AI models? I've noticed that models tend to
| be better with languages like TypeScript than Swift because
| of issues like that.
| mitchellh wrote:
| Not at all. Give it tools and skills and it figures it
| out very quickly. Must be an agent. Don't use chat.
| fragmede wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Big fan. Can I get a ride on your jet?
| rcarmo wrote:
| Many thanks for everything. Without Ghostty I wouldn't have
| been able to create https://github.com/rcarmo/webterm and have
| a decent browser-based terminal that works the way I expect it
| to.
| linsomniac wrote:
| mitchellh: What is the current thinking WRT adding
| client/server functionality (like built-in tmux+mosh)? I recall
| you talking about it on the Changelog podcast, and that would
| be a killer feature for me; I really make a lot of use of the
| wezterm equivalent, it's so nice having first-class UI windows
| rather than tmux's faking of it.
| makeramen wrote:
| Zellij has been holding me over with tabs and panes (in quick
| terminal) while I wait for them to come to ghostty directly.
|
| Tabs (and panes? I haven't tried yet) should work fine for
| regular terminal windows though.
| nicoritschel wrote:
| Did a double take on this one since my Ghostty has had
| panes for a while now (I run tip/nightly). Didn't realize
| it's not part of the current release.
|
| Also, Zellij is nice.
| makeramen wrote:
| Ah I just started using ghostty maybe a week ago and I
| mostly use quick terminal so I might be missing the panes
| on the regular windows.
| adrum wrote:
| There's a PR out there for tabs in quick terminal
| https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9857
| linsomniac wrote:
| Just to clarify, it's more about the ability to run a
| terminal on my Linux box and connect and disconnect to it
| from my Mac that I'm looking for. Wezterm does a good job
| of this. Previously I was using tmux and mosh and Nebula,
| and that worked really great for reconnecting (I almost
| never had to reconnect, it just stayed live, wezterm I need
| to reconnect all the time, but that works reliably). But
| copy-paste with tmux is meh.
| blorenz wrote:
| Excited to see the further development of libghostty! It is an
| exciting project in this new world of being able to develop
| your own agentic development environments rather effortlessly.
| These things are possible because of projects like yours. Thank
| you!
| foobarincaps wrote:
| I use Ghostty as my main TUI at work and absolutely love it.
| Most of my day lives in terminals, and Ghostty just feels fast,
| clean, and out of the way in the best possible sense.
|
| I was a long-time Kitty user, but switching to Ghostty has been
| a big upgrade for my workflow. Hard to go back now. Thank you
| msikora wrote:
| I started using it a few days ago and then I need to find
| something in the terminal. But....there is no find! Why? Can
| you guys add it? This is such a basic and critical feature that
| I may have to just go back to...just about anything else.
| james_marks wrote:
| find is provided by the OS, not a terminal emulator like
| Ghostty. Most likely something is wrong with your paths.
| jfaulken wrote:
| I think they mean like CTRL+F kind of find.
|
| This is addressed in paragraph 5 of the post they replied
| to.
| mijoharas wrote:
| Hey Mitchell, thanks for ghostty (happy user here for a month
| or two). Is there anywhere I can look to see the status of the
| next planned release?
|
| I've been waiting for the vim feature to hit stable, and have
| just been checking to see if there's a new release every so
| often, but I couldn't find a discussion or anything to see when
| it was planned.
| fartfeatures wrote:
| Is there any chance of a stable release that fixes the memory
| leak issue? I know I could run nightly but for something I
| spend all day every day using I'd much rather run a stable
| version.
| mitchellh wrote:
| New stable release in 1 to 2 weeks.
| s_ting765 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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..
| ..
| bilinguliar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The minimum-contrast feature is great, to help in those times
| when some color combination would have been unreadable otherwise.
| Myzel394 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| you can always export TERM=xterm or some other value if
| that's causing you grief while distros catch up.
| bewuethr wrote:
| Have you seen the `ssh-terminfo` option for shell
| integration? https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-
| integration-...
| icedrift wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than
| Kitty.
|
| What are you talking about? What UI does Kitty have?
| ghosty141 wrote:
| He probably refers to the fact that Ghostty aims to use the
| native window decorations etc.. So for example on Ubuntu it
| uses gtk, on mac the native macOS tab bar etc. Same goes for
| the scrollbar and search window.
|
| I really like this a lot.
| nout wrote:
| Big one are the tabs. Kitty has tabs, but rendered in the
| text rows, so it's missing features that the native OS tabs
| provide (drag and drop, easy to move around and split into
| windows...)
| landtuna wrote:
| Same. On the tip of main, at least, I can open the command
| palette and choose reset to bring it back to life. I set a
| keybinding for reset to skip the command palette.
| tux1968 wrote:
| 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.
| tw1984 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The tip releases have had search support for a few months:
|
| https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
|
| 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.
| yearolinuxdsktp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I keep trying it but keep coming back to alacritty on Linux and
| iterm2 on osx.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Worth posting here: https://github.com/ghostty-
| org/ghostty/discussions
| pbjerkeseth wrote:
| 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 [1]:
| https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
| gigatexal wrote:
| Bigger than ghostty is libghostty which enables things like:
| https://www.cmux.dev/
| operatingthetan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| what bugs did you hit? I have been using it a few days now no
| issues.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| 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.
| JCattheATM wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you don't mind, can you share your config?
| am17an wrote:
| Damn I'm jealous that they figured out how to pay their
| contributors. I've been toiling away for free
| signorovitch wrote:
| 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
| dmix wrote:
| I haven't used ghostty but terminal having issues with ssh
| sounds like a major oversight.
| oofbey wrote:
| 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.
| eoskx wrote:
| 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.
| big-chungus4 wrote:
| Bro randomly decides to post a link to ghosty docs and gets 275
| points
| mkl wrote:
| Submission upvotes don't count nearly as much as comment
| upvotes in terms of points.
| jbrooks84 wrote:
| Why use this over iterm 2?
| ashton314 wrote:
| 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.
| -\\_(tsu)_/- Anyway, I didn't think of it at the time and
| Ghostty saved me.
| Acur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What kind of features am I missing if I just use GNOME Terminal?
| veqq wrote:
| The biggest boon is that it's a development target for making
| TUIs etc. App developers get the most benefit out of it.
| wateralien wrote:
| Can't use it yet because I need cmd-f find.
| vermon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
| Composition, lighting and creativity are no more than tools
| either.
| cafebeen wrote:
| Yes, and one of my favorite anecdotes like this: at one of the
| greatest jazz concert ever recorded, Charlie Parker played a
| cheap plastic saxophone because he hadn't brought his own.
|
| https://jazzfuel.com/charlie-parker-the-plastic-saxophone-th...
| drcongo wrote:
| This is a very weird take. For people who spend their entire
| day in the terminal, having the right terminal is incredibly
| important. Like saying track athletes shouldn't spend money on
| running shoes if they own a pair of slippers.
| n42 wrote:
| I have no idea why I am responding to someone who flippantly
| uses a phrase like "dilittante mindset", but here we go
|
| there is definitely a tendency for noobs and amateurs in any
| hobby or industry to obsess over expensive gear and things that
| don't matter (I love the term "buyhard" for it). you're out of
| your mind if you think the professionals in literally any
| industry do not discuss the specific technical tradeoffs of
| tools they are using among themselves.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| They don't discuss tradeoffs of every tool, just the ones
| that offer the most leverage
| leephillips wrote:
| When art critics get together they talk about Form and
| Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk
| about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
|
| -- Pablo Picasso
| jasondigitized wrote:
| From one old man to another it's tough when you lose that
| spark.
| thoughtfulchris wrote:
| 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) 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
|
| Project: https://www.ink-web.dev/
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sponno wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ghostty with sidebars and more https://github.com/manaflow-
| ai/cmux
| MajorBee wrote:
| 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
|
| I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important
| to my personal git worktree ergonomics.
| ionwake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These look like the major past threads (in reverse order) - have
| I missed any?
|
| _AI Usage Policy_ -
| 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 - Jan 2026 (138
| comments)
|
| _Why users cannot create Issues directly_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 - Jan 2026 (310
| comments)
|
| _Ghostty is now non-profit_ -
| 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 - Dec 2025 (115
| comments)
|
| _Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 - Oct 2025 (147
| comments)
|
| _Ghostty 1.2.0_ - 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 - Aug 2025 (464
| comments)
|
| _We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application_ -
| 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 - Jan 2025 (79
| comments)
|
| _Deja vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 - Dec 2024 (55
| comments)
|
| _Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 - Dec 2024 (7
| comments)
|
| _Ghostty 1.0_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 -
| Dec 2024 (681 comments)
|
| _Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32
| comments)
| Newuser6923 wrote:
| This is a test comment
| mastabadtomm wrote:
| We often see Ghostty on the front page. What makes this project
| special? Is it solving a big problem with current terminal apps?
| nout wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/gho...
| orsorna wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| why does everyone freak out about this terminal whenever it's
| posted?
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