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Libghostty is coming

mitchellh.com

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Re: Libghostty is coming

#111

Post by jauntywundrkind »

kortex wrote: post #45
hackitup7 wrote: post #10

I love how this guy founds + takes public + sells a multibillion company and then just goes right back to hacking. Legend.

Hashimoto is an absolute wizard, but what I find most compelling about him is his absolutely uncanny ability to segment and abstract systems and interfaces in a way for maximum composability and minimal entanglement. He's like the walking embodiment of Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy philosophy. It's like he designs software systems in such a way that they have no choice but to operate correctly and predictably. Also…

The nerds would do sooo much better for ourselves if we could build a momentum behind comments like this.

Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.

As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/

This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#112

Post by amiga386 »

siavosh wrote: post #92

Total newb here - but lets say i want to make a terminal based video game (think old school text / visuals / menus), will something like Libghostty be something relevant to that?

No, you would use ncurses, or a library built on it (like Curses Development Kit, CDK)

Re: Libghostty is coming

#113

Post by metaltyphoon »

ldemailly wrote: post #42
bigwheels wrote: post #7

This is super cool, it will be so nice to have a truly omni-platform terminal emulator that can even conceivably extend to iOS and Android. Aside: I didn't realize Ghostty was written in Zig, wow. The first Zig-thing I'm aware of using on a regular basis. It's amusing the repository structure looks exactly like a Golang layout, haha. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

It doesn’t (look like a go layout) and that’s a good thing because pkg/ src/ etc aren’t good go directories.

Since go 1.25 you can declare the what is the “root” of a go module, which is a good thing. Not everyone wants the top level directory filled with go files specially in a multi language repo. So this idea that /src is not good go directory will soon be outdated.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#114

Post by mixmastamyk »

tambourine_man wrote: post #90
tambourine_man wrote: post #73

I really want to like Ghostty but: - Still no ⌘F for find. - No way (that I know of) to select previous output or specific string and copy with only keyboard shortcuts. - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect). - Fonts still don't render as nicely as in Terminal.app. I've fiddled with `font-thicken-strength` and it's close, but not quite. Probably impos…

By the rollercoaster of points this post is experiencing, I may have expressed myself poorly. To be clear, the concept of a modern, cross-platform Terminal core with native GUI implementations for each major vendor is amazing and I'm very glad it exists. It's just not quite there yet for me and I don't know if it ever will be. But I'm very excited by it and hopeful.

I was also downvoted for mentioning a few other minor things it is missing as well. While I'm holding out, it's getting there however.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#115

Post by metaltyphoon »

on_the_train wrote: post #48

I have a confession: I don't know the difference between a console, terminal (-emulator?!?), shell, bash and all these things. It's all just a black window with text for me. I've never understood why people talk so much about git shell when my normal windows cmd/Powershell can do just the same git commands. I'm also a prolific and successful software engineer. These two things shouldn't mix. So please tell me what I…

Old but amazing good small series.

https://youtu.be/07Q9oqNLXB4?si=FthNcZSYQSNnT0mP

Re: Libghostty is coming

#116

Post by jsrcout »

horsawlarway wrote: post #97
alostpuppy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ghostty. The only thing that is missing is a find feature which is such an odd omissions for an incredible piece of software.

To add... The missing scrollbars feel painful to me. I don't even want them for scrolling, really. I want the visual reference for: "How much content is in this window" and "Where am I in that content" I still use it daily but it means I have to switch tools for certain things, and reading log files or log output is one of the more common reasons I switch. I should probably look into trying to get the scrollback info…

Same here, scroll bars are literally the one missing feature keeping me from making Ghostty my daily driver. But the release notes roadmap mentions they will add them for 1.3. Waiting with anticipation.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#117

Post by xz18r »

Igrom wrote: post #44

I want to use this to modernize vterm in Emacs. If I could only synchronize the terminal cursor and the Emacs point, and preserve lines as lines, not split them...

I am not sure i understand your problem 100% but Emacs’ tty package can solve a lot of cursor issues in a terminal emulator.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#118

Post by zenlot »

doctoboggan wrote: post #82
zenlot wrote: post #38

I use ghostty daily now. Switched recently. In macOS I can re-map now caps lock to be cmd and it works for cmd+c. Everything else is great, sensible defaults and what's not easily customizable. Gruvbox light theme looks great too. The fact it's written in Zig is awesome too, if you ever question if Zig is ready, ghostty is your answer to that. Not seeing myself going back. It's great experience. Tip: if you combine y…

Can you tell my why I should consider ghostty? (as a daily Terminal.app user)

Fast. Very fast. Good configuration and theming options too. Literally no lag, even with thousands of lines scrollback. It doesn't get in your way on your day to day terminal activities. Feels natural.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#119

Post by shoo_pl »

tambourine_man wrote: post #73

I really want to like Ghostty but: - Still no ⌘F for find. - No way (that I know of) to select previous output or specific string and copy with only keyboard shortcuts. - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect). - Fonts still don't render as nicely as in Terminal.app. I've fiddled with `font-thicken-strength` and it's close, but not quite. Probably impos…

Not to mention that every time you ssh to another server your keyboard stops working correctly.

The solution is on their website:

> infocmp -x xterm-ghostty | ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x -

I mean... I could learn what it does, but no way on earth I am going to be typing something like that every time I want to ssh somewhere.

(This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

Re: Libghostty is coming

#120

Post by mitchellh »

shoo_pl wrote: post #119
tambourine_man wrote: post #73

I really want to like Ghostty but: - Still no ⌘F for find. - No way (that I know of) to select previous output or specific string and copy with only keyboard shortcuts. - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect). - Fonts still don't render as nicely as in Terminal.app. I've fiddled with `font-thicken-strength` and it's close, but not quite. Probably impos…

Not to mention that every time you ssh to another server your keyboard stops working correctly. The solution is on their website: > infocmp -x xterm-ghostty | ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x - I mean... I could learn what it does, but no way on earth I am going to be typing something like that every time I want to ssh somewhere. (This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reaso…

> (This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

"For whatever reason": because it requires modifying `ssh` and doing that by default is a really sketchy thing to do because it is a very security sensitive tool. No program (Ghostty included) should be mucking with that by default. We want users to be aware.

"Can't it just work?": No, because the entire mechanism is flawed, and I didn't invent the mechanism. It's like asking, "why must I drive to my destination, can't I just teleport?" The entire premise of the question is silly, and it's not the car's fault (Ghostty is the car in this example). For those who want to learn more about "the mechanism": read Ghostty's terminfo page, but also just do some light web searching on how terminfo works. Its a total nightmare.

I really wish that weren't the case, I really do. I promise its just as annoying to me as a user and more annoying to me as a maintainer to have to hear people complain about this repeatedly when I'm not doing anything wrong, personally. I'm playing by the rules. The rules are just bullshit.

We'll continue to make enhancements to improve this while we wait for Ghostty's terminfo to propagate to every machine in the world. It will, it'll just take... a long time. Next up we plan on introducing a `ghostty +ssh` command that you can drop-in replace most `ssh` usage with and it'll automagically just work.

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