Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

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.

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!

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

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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!

[flagged]

Hi,

Big fan. Can I get a ride on your jet?

> front page

Nice! Looks like I should have rushed the interview. :D

> 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

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. ;)

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.

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).

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...

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

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.

SecureCRT is a paid program I’ve used for years and it’s just so comprehensive. It’s not cheap but the quality shows.

Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.

> 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.

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.

Kitty has poor security

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2084

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty.

What are you talking about? What UI does Kitty have?

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.

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.

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.

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...

Composition, lighting and creativity are no more than tools either.

From one old man to another it's tough when you lose that spark.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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 have tried every possible setting but SSH ends up breaking more often than not. As opposed to iTerm which just works.

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.

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.

I haven't used ghostty but terminal having issues with ssh sounds like a major oversight.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ghostty is extremely performant. I had a bug in some concurrent software; when I added logging the bug would disappear because the threads acquiring the lock on STDERR was sufficient to make the bug go away. On Ghostty this happened fast enough that I was able to reproduce the bug.

Maybe I should have been writing everything to a file. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, I didn’t think of it at the time and Ghostty saved me.

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

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.

Because someone thought it was interesting, and enough other people upvoted it.

Just because you know about it doesn’t mean others can’t benefit from the mention.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Looking at the comments it seems like there are still people not using it

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.

Wezterms is certainly nice. I guess they haven't release another update? Currently stick to iTerm2.

Worth posting here: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Submission upvotes don't count nearly as much as comment upvotes in terms of points.

I have Ghostty 1.2.3 and it STILL does not have cmd+F find.