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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

ghostty.org

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Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#111

Post by mitchellh »

WD-42 wrote: post #71
mitchellh wrote: post #33

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 th…

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!

Overall I would describe it as "amusing."

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.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#112

Post by JCattheATM »

Curious to hear some more recommendations, I settled on using lxterminal which works well enough. I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did, kitty doesn't support tabs and ghosttty sounds like it has issues with ssh connections? I feel like I tried most at some point but if anyone has suggestions for a tabbed terminal emulator nicer than lxterminal, ideally with transparency, I'd love to hear them.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#113

Post by michaelcampbell »

sideeffffect wrote: post #82
bArray wrote: post #31

For anyone using this terminal that hates != (and others) being turned into a single character, I have the following to turn off ligatures: font-feature = -dlig font-feature = -liga font-feature = -calt This can be updated in `$HOME/.config/ghostty/config`.

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 :)

Going to give this one a try; I'm still partial to Atkinson hyper legible, but this one looks fun.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#114

Post by tcoff91 »

jcgl wrote: post #48
pdimitar wrote: post #28

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.…

> 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 appreci…

Kitty is the GOAT terminal

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#115

Post by scosman »

mitchellh wrote: post #33

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 th…

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!

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#116

Post by pdimitar »

everforward wrote: post #78
pdimitar wrote: post #28

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.…

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.

Detaching is working just fine with `screen` as well.

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.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#118

Post by pdimitar »

dbdr wrote: post #57
pdimitar wrote: post #28

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.…

> 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.

Cool, but I'm 100% clueless as to how. Haven't migrated to Linux yet and this one of the next important items for me to learn.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#119

Post by idoubtit »

jcgl wrote: post #48
pdimitar wrote: post #28

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.…

> 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 appreci…

I'm not the GP, but I do remember why I rejected Kitty when I tried several terminal emulators last years: it broke quite a few of my workflows.

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.

[^1]: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/13328

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#120

Post by signorovitch »

My only issue with ghostty is it isn’t immediately recognized by some programs through ssh (eg less) and they don’t operate properly. However there’s a one liner that solves the problem permanently on the remote machine[0] so it isn’t too bad. Hopefully in the near future ghostty’s terminfo will be shipped with common linux distros.

[0] https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

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