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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

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Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#151

Post by fragmede »

icedrift wrote: post #74
Myzel394 wrote: post #68

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.

you can always export TERM=xterm or some other value if that's causing you grief while distros catch up.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#152

Post by NateEag »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #121
homebrewer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spend any amount of time on remote machines with unreliable connections, local tmux is insta-reject because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient. As with GP, it's also why I don't consider terminal emulators without tabs at all.

> because tmux inside tmux is very inconvenient. Hitting c-b c-b isn't that inconvenient?

Agreed.

I hold Control and double-tap b for managing the remote session, then everything else is the same.

Granted, I'm not a power user, so there may be numbers that get frustrating. I could imagine complex splits getting confusing (I don't use splits at all).

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#153

Post by fragmede »

danso wrote: post #134
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…

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...

Fwiw x the program alt-tab on Mac gives macOS a more sane alt-tab behavior.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#154

Post by rcarmo »

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…

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.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#155

Post by FireBeyond »

1f60c wrote: post #15
dwedge wrote: post #14

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 s…

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 definitely have had to poke at things a bit, even where they "should" work. I use salt in my homelab and eventually got the xterm-ghostty.terminfo file and I put it in my baseline salt config, then you run 'tic -x xterm-ghostty.terminfo'.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#156

Post by kazinator »

kccqzy wrote: post #66
lomlobon wrote: post #11

How's the latency? I've had to keep using xterm even though it kind of sucks just because it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit.

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.

Rather, what will win is a terminal that internally builds an efficient, symbolic representation of what is on the display, rather than a pixel representation with all the font glyph, and which efficiently sychronizes that symbolic representation to the graphical canvas, skipping intermediate updates when the abstract display is changing too fast.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#157

Post by linsomniac »

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…

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.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#158

Post by kazinator »

0sdi wrote: post #17
lomlobon wrote: post #11

How's the latency? I've had to keep using xterm even though it kind of sucks just because it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit.

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.

Where are you measuring the keypress from? The nerve signal to your finger muscles?> Or the time the keycap hits bottom? What if the switch closes before the cap hits bottom: then we are getting a latency figure that looks better than it really is.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#159

Post by vermon »

I've been following this before it was made public and I'm a big Zig fan so I would definitely switch to this, but I've tried and failed many times. Currently it just keeps crashing multiple times (on three different machines) each day on my mac and the quick terminal doesn't support full screen mode (it still shows the menu bar). I could live with the menu bar showing, but because of the constant crashing I'll wait for a bit and check back in a few months.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#160

Post by yomismoaqui »

The fetishization of tools is one of the things that mark a dilettante mindset.

You see it on all hobbies, e.g. when the someone sees a photograph and their first question is about what camera and optics were used. No question about composition, light, the moment, creativity... they only care for the tools.

The technique and knowledge is the important thing, not the tools. They forget the good practitioner can do a great photo with a $200 phone than they with the best Canon DSLR.

I have seen this in all hobbies I have practiced, be it musical instruments, kolinsky brushes on miniature painting, montain bikers, running apparell...

As I'm getting older I care less about editors, terminals, Linux distros... and after seeing what can be done with agentic coding tools less so.

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