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Libghostty is coming

mitchellh.com

171–180 of 275 posts

Re: Libghostty is coming

#171
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?

To expand on the other replies: There are two very different tasks here.

This library would be for the task of taking a received ECMA-48 character stream and turning that into a series of actions on some sort of model of a terminal's display, keyboard, and mouse.

You are looking at a library for the (roughly) inverse task of taking a model of UI widgets and turning that into a transmitted ECMA-48 character stream.

Here's an example of the former:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decode...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/SoftTerm.h

Here's an example of the latter:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Output...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIDisplayCo...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIVIO.h

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIVIOWidget...

Re: Libghostty is coming

#172
post #137

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…

Should be soon: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

6 months. 1.3 does not release until March 2026.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you use grep to search the scrollback/screen buffer?

Try a pager instead. Batcat is more feature rich but there's always the good old less (and more) command. Both work great with grep. I do things like the following multiple times a day $ cat foo.log | less $ cat foo.log | $PAGER $ cat foo.log | grep 09-23-2025 | less Side note / pro tip: on a new line in the terminal press control-x control-e. If you're in zsh you need to edit your config but this will work out of th…

You can leave the cat at home.

  less foo.log
  grep 09-25-2025 foo.log | less

Re: Libghostty is coming

#174
post #164
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good is grep if you want to search the build log on your screen that took an hour in the making? Should have thought of tee-ing it, well duh.

You just rawdog that to stdout without a log file?

I do. Setting up log files for each and every command seems tedious. I would rather just cmd+f to search and have it work for everything, as it is a property of the terminal, rather than a specific command.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something? The LGPL only applies to the library itself--you can dynamically link to it from proprietary code. So in this hypothetical scenario, someone could just write a terminal emulator (or IDE, or what have you) that dynamically links to libghostty and put as much telemetry in it as they wanted, couldn't they?

>> Am I missing something? No, you're not but I did! So GPL then. Maybe I just wanted to make up a scenario. I'm not sure why MIT/BSD have become so popular, they have their place but I don't think they have any place in software infrastructure.

[deleted]

Re: Libghostty is coming

#178
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's fast. Like, faster than your brain expects it to be. I live in vim and after about 30 seconds of checking ghostty out I switched from iTerm2 to ghostty for good. No regerts.

I use terminology today, which is also "fast." The major issue I run into with ghostty vs terminology is that ssh in ghostty is broken due to the terminfo thing. I don't fully understand why ghostty can't pretend to be a different terminal that remotes know about (for now), but I assume there's some reason.

Re: Libghostty is coming

#179
It is Ghostty that makes me believe Zig is ready for industry, and I also want to make a game engine targeting Android and iOS first, however, JNI is really annoying and I hate Google Android. I have tried Bevy for Android and as you can see it's not the fault of game engine but Google. So, use Unity or challenge it. Just do it, thanks Gostty!

Re: Libghostty is coming

#180
post #9

i desperately want to use ghostty but cmd+f support is just such a dealbreaker. excited about this development though!

I started using it months ago and don't miss that so much, if I really can't rerun the command and pipe it to less/grep. I'll just use the mouse to copy it to the clipboard and then run `xclip -o` (linux) or `pbpaste` (mac) and pipe it to grep. I know there's a keybinding for putting the buffer in a file, but copying with the mouse is faster than finding it.

Also, not sure if this is by default or it picked it up from my old iTerm2 configuration, but cmd+shift+up/down navigates through prompt lines so it's easy to find the start of a long command. My PS1 in zsh is:

    PS1='%1~ %F{green}»%f '
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