Ghostty – Terminal Emulator(ghostty.org) |
Ghostty – Terminal Emulator(ghostty.org) |
I have the feeling that I must be missing something big here.
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.
Maybe this is why the creator is touting the use of libghostty, the underlying library.
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!
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.
WARNING: terminal is not fully functional
Press RETURN to continue
...which I thought a little odd.
No complaints been happy using it for my claude swarms for about a month
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.
Also, does it support visible control characters ? EXACT EMULATION ? 3270 ? VT-105 ? VT-220 ? VT-320 ? VT-420 ? SIXEL ? NAPLPS ?
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...
Some people do not care about the difference, but it is definitely there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
stay gold, shine bright
for libghostty consumers, favorite i've tried so far is neurosnap/zmx.
I did give Ghostty a try, the turn off was Adwaita, the tablet UI for the tabs and context menu.. i just can't
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.
> 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....
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.
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.
E.g. with MacOS terminal, I launch Claude, with Ghostty, I launch opencode, with Attyx I launch pi
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
If so that actually sounds really cool. I'd like a dedicated lazygit app in my tray at all times.
Project mentions Windows compiles but isn't tested. Do you have a gut check on what issues there might be?
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.
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…
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.
I recall the package manager war of Haskell between "stack" and "cabal-install":
Users would have strong opinion depending on their background.
But the developers eventually made both projects use the same libraries.
Both tools allow for ghcup to manage the compiler, so there's no conflict there.
The difference is eventually just a frontend experience, and all the heavy lifting and synergy is achieved behind the scenes.
I would not have believed the same is possible for terminals, even cross-platform, so thank you for having this vision.
Let's say I'm the creator of Alacritty, would I have more problems adding libghostty than it's generically named identical counterpart libtermengine?
The real goal isn't for Alacrity or Kitty or WezTerm or any other terminal to use libghostty. I think over the long term, terminal emulator user bases dwindle down to niche (but important) use cases.
The real goal is for higher-level tooling (GUI or browser) that utilizes terminal-like programs to have something like libghostty to reach for. I think this represents the much, much larger ecosystem out there that likely touches many more people. For example, Neovim's terminal mode, terminal multiplexers, PaaS build systems, agentic tooling, etc. You're seeing this emerge in force already with the awesome-libghostty repo.
libghostty would still be useful for traditional terminal emulators to replatform on, and for example xterm.js is seriously looking into it (and I'm happy to help and even offered their maintainer a maintainer spot on libghostty). But, they're not the goal. And if fragile egos hold people back, it's really not my problem, it's theirs.
Just that it's a specific "product"-y sounding name? Would you also be concerned about "libwayland" vs "libcompositor"? Genuinely curious: this seems like an insightful question, I just don't follow the reasoning.
I'm sure you feel the same watching Ghostty become what it has. Big thank you.
Tabs (and panes? I haven't tried yet) should work fine for regular terminal windows though.
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?
that might be a viable approach for you
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1loiw2z/comment/n0...
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.
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
Essentially, I have a few features that have a TUI-first UI, and the obvious next step is to expose some of that to a browser.
Out of curiosity, does ghostty do the Quake terminal thing - I use yakuake for this, but it feels a bit long in the tooth.
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.
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.
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)
Déjà 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)
What are you talking about? What UI does Kitty have?
I really like this a lot.
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.
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.
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.
font-feature = -dlig
font-feature = -liga
font-feature = -calt
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 :)
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.
Kitty needed to do it too back in 2018.
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.
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.
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)
I liked the idea of a fast new terminal, but not enough to RTFM before figuring out if it was worth switching.
For me, Kitty still has the edge:
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
WezTerm is also a strong contender:
Even if that's fixed, that design put me off the terminal forever.
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.
[0]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit [1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
And I’m not running a critical piece of productivity software on a nightlies channel!
Didn’t realize how may projects use libghostty, will try cmux one of these days.
* "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.
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.
I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important to my personal git worktree ergonomics.
wt.exe https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n0dx20hk701?hl=en-US&gl=U...
pwsh.exe 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).
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/
Nice! Looks like I should have rushed the interview. :D
Big fan. Can I get a ride on your jet?
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...
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.
WezTerm is a very good replacement.
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.
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.
But you do have to run a proper window manager so you don’t have to require tab support in every single app. ;)
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...
Another option is to leave the tabbing to your window manager.
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.
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.
Surprised none of the other commenters have mentioned zellij. I work across windows (WSL) and linux so really like having the same set up for both, which means no Ghostty/Kitty since they don't support windows.
Zellij is a lot smoother and nicer looking out the box, and its key shortcuts are pretty intuitive. There's a lit of advantages to not having an extra layer, but zellij + alacritty is definitely worth having in your list of options!
BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?
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.
I hate mixed mouse + keyboard workflows as well.
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.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
https://jazzfuel.com/charlie-parker-the-plastic-saxophone-th...
But "fake it until you make it" is part of life too and everyone wants to belong and to be taken seriously. You can't always just "do the hobby for fun" if you want to be social since anxious intermediates whose own output is still crap will gate-keep.
If you can, find hobbies that bring you joy and do them alone, free from the influence of too much right and wrong, at least in the first stages.
In the context of terminal emulators, idk, do something like learn AWK purely for personal enjoyment. You may not have the flashiest dotfiles or color schemes or whatever, but you'll be able to do arcane stuff in the terminal that will give you confidence you belong and others will be amazed by.
This isn't directed at you, of course. Just a weird observation where people are prescribing their workflows to others and telling them what they should or shouldn't care about when the only thing they know about their workflow is that they use a terminal at least once a day.
I wish I could get out of the habit of opening Vim in VSCode's terminal window but sometimes I'm tweaking something that's "not part of this thing" and it kind of makes sense that way.
If you don’t care about your craft or workflow enough to care about what tools you use, I wonder what level of quality you can achieve.
But, for me, there is a certain threshold that a tool must pass to be useful. A tool that is below this level is only slowing you down or limiting your abilities.
You wouldn't use a knife to tighten screws if you have a perfectly good screwdriver lying around. And there's little to no advantage of buying a new expensive or over-engineered screwdriver.
I believe, plain vi is the lowest I can go for writing code. That doesn't mean that I can't use notepad or nano, but they fall under the level of being useful and only cripple and slow me down.
Ghostty passes this level of usability for me, but personally I'm fine with st - no gpu, no cpu spikes, uses barely any ram and still feels snappier. So, what's the point?
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.
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.
host * SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color
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.
I've personally given up on using the various "modern" terminals, they end up missing too many features (and then try to claim xterm compatibility), and especially if you use devices outside the standard linux systems (e.g. old/embedded hardware, switches), they have too many rendering issues.
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.
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.
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.
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
Edit: just saw your second link from 4 months and yes, it's now avg 13ms which feels about right to me. Not perfect but acceptable. So what's even the point of sharing the old benchmark?
Ghostty performs very well on this regard, among the same league as Alacritty and Ptyxis.
Foot/Alacritty also feel amazing but they don't have some features of Ghostty.
My benchmark is opening neovim and scrolling with the mousewheel so not sure how represantative that is though
repaint_delay 5
input_delay 1
sync_to_monitor noSo here we are
Feel free to open issues in the repo, I'll find a way to get a Windows machine if there's interest.
You can also email me at `trolley [at] wands [dot] is`
This is addressed in paragraph 5 of the post they replied to.
Let's say I'm the creator of ghostty "competition".
The fact that is has the same name, could feel if I change that:
- Maybe my users start thinking why don't I use ghostty instead - Will the maintainers of libghostty chose more oriented to ghostty than for my terminal?
It's a half assed analogy, but think if Google's V8 would be called ChromeEngine instead of V8.
Still not fixed: https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/3494
So true. To the point I have to maintain my own fork to make the command key my meta
But I’m just busting your chops, don’t listen to me. I don’t even use i3/Sway, or use tabs at all. Everyone has their own workflow that works best for them.
Also, Zellij is nice.
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.
Indeed, it does! Somehow i had missed it!
Thank you very much!
Hitting c-b c-b isn't that inconvenient?
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).
On reboot it remembers my tabs and panels and even commands that ran inside last (i.e there is popup in every panel that had something runing to run it again or just open a terminal)
Before my great wayland migration I ran patched st and it was great. Terminal job is render what terminal multi-plexer gives it and passes input to multiplexer.
SetEnv TERM=xterm-256colorAny 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.
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.
I've been slow on the agent pickup. The ethical issues really bother me (LLMs in general), though it's clear I'm not gonna have a choice in this industry so I've been caving recently. The persistent narrative that agents can build entire complex software systems is also irritating, because that clearly doesn't seem to align with reality.
I was thinking that downloading the full official documentation, separated by sections inside the repository someone is working on with Zig, could be useful, but maybe there are more optimal ways to approach this.
Thanks.
What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.
That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.
The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.
I've used a terminal as my main interface FOREVER, and I'm amazed that people are joining this healthy habit of interacting with the computer as CREATORS.
Websites used to be below 100KiB - now they come with MEGABYTES of obfuscated JS.. wtf
Though obviously, it's not the individual developer to blame but the incentive system.
I laugh every time I see someone on HN asserting that the web "shouldn't" be used for anything beyond "documents and lightly interactive content", which is not uncomment. There's some real old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy there.
All of those people are now the vibe coders of the 20s, and it's going to end up in the same dumpster fire of 'Who knew it might be a good idea to cryptographically sign and control library packages in a public repository?'
* Note: I'm distinguishing things going sideways despite best intentions and careful planning from YOLO + 'Oops, how could that possibly have happened?' shit