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.
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!
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…
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.
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.
while I agree, the comment you just replied to says:
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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).
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):
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
> 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
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.
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
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.
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...
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip
Another option is to leave the tabbing to your window manager.
BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?
* "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have the feeling that I must be missing something big here.
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.
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
Ghostty performs very well on this regard, among the same league as Alacritty and Ptyxis.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
For me, Kitty still has the edge:
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
WezTerm is also a strong contender:
https://wezterm.org/
Even if that's fixed, that design put me off the terminal forever.
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.