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We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

mitchellh.com

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Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#161

Post by kristianp »

account42 wrote: post #110
mitchellh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That lead me to think that GTK and the GObject system is opinionated in a way that are not terribly compatible with my own opinions. This might be amusing for me to say but... I also feel this way. I disagree a lot with the Gnome ecosystem's point of view. Funny! Using GTK for Linux was a pragmatic choice. A goal of Ghostty is to be "platform-native" (defined here because there's no such thing on Linux: https://gho…

> GTK is by various definitions the most popular, widespread GUI toolkit on Linux that makes your app fit into _most_ ecosystems. I disagree. Qt is also quite popular and much better at adapting to the environment it runs in.

I just use the default terminal, konsole, in kubuntu. Is Ghostty that much better?

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#162

Post by iammrpayments »

corsica wrote: post #2

I don't get the hype around this application. The only UI Ghostty has is tabs and the context menu, is it really worth the integration pain and now this rewrite? Maybe they're planning for more, like those GUI configuration dialogs that iterm2 has? Kitty uses OpenGL for everything and draws its own tabs, they're fully customizable and can be made to look however you want. By not wasting time on integrating with massi…

My font doesn’t look as nice on Kitty as it does on Ghostty. The only place that looks better than ghostty is neovide, but they don’t support tabs yet, and because it is more resource intensive, it drains the battery faster.

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#163

Post by NoGravitas »

Lerc wrote: post #47
hactually wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do that on Windows/mac? Gnome devs not withstanding, you have access to the source to change it if you want or put up a PR?

Being able to make a small change is good when every thing is well defined small parts. You can change the part you want and then use everything else as per normal. If everything is so tightly integrated that you end up having to maintain a fork of a large project, it doesn't work out so well. I don't know which is true for this particular case, but I'd hazard a guess that it is a much bigger task than it needs to be…

You can look at the code of an extension that does the move, if you want an idea of what the level of effort is: https://github.com/kuvaus/moveclock

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#164

Post by crawshaw »

eviks wrote: post #160
crawshaw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is about doing what you can, with what you have, where you are. That is good.

Since you can do both (you're reading a post about a RE-write) your 1-dimensional framework doesn't help deciding what is good

If you believe everything around you must be good before you can do good, then you must trick yourself into believing imperfect things are good to do anything, or withdraw completely from the world. Your radical philosophy leads either to delusion or isolation and inaction. Just do what you can.

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#165

Post by NoGravitas »

ur-whale wrote: post #128
biorach wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be $TERM needs to be set or you need to add ghostty to terminfo

> Might be $TERM needs to be set or you need to add ghostty to terminfo Yeah, except that the specific terminfo needed for ghostty isn't installed anywhere on the boxes you ssh into ... you need to manually install it on every single one of them. That in and of itself makes it truly painful to switch to ghostty. And there are still a lot of other issues, like e.g. building the tip is a freaking nightmare of dependenc…

Or just "export TERM=xterm-256color". Lose support for Ghostty-specific features, but get the subset that works everywhere.

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#166

Post by ogoffart »

microtonal wrote: post #146
ozim wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Qt license is not annoying. Qt the company is annoying because they make it super hard to use community edition and it is super annoying having per developer licensing with all kinds of super annoying BS one have to deal with when developing for Qt. For Electron I can get 20 devs hired tomorrow or I myself can start project right away and be up and running in minutes.

Yep, externalization of costs, make it easier for yourself and shittier for the user. Well done ;). That said, Electron has made the number of Linux apps go up, which is a win. Still highly prefer native macOS apps on Mac and GTK/Qt apps on Linux, but I know that's a losing battle.

Did you know about Slint https://slint.dev ? What do you think about it?

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#167

Post by skydhash »

flohofwoe wrote: post #158
skydhash wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, both KDE and GNOME had an architecture already where they changed only the base layer to adapt to wayland. Wlroot have a different architecture. And that’s why you have three mainstream implementations.

Slightly unrelated, but I wonder why the "Linux desktop maintainers" (whoever that is - and that this is even a question is probably the main problem) haven't come up yet with a minimal shared 'interface library' that's mandatory on each Linux desktop installation, and which provides a standard API (but no implementation) to create a window, get input events and probably also a set of simple UI widgets (buttons, slid…

I’m not a maintainer, but IMO, it may be the different design systems. Yes there are common elements like buttons and scrolled view. But the whole selling point of a toolkit is consistency, especially around more advanced widgets.

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#169

Post by don_searchcraft »

monksy wrote: post #79

Biggest issue I have with Ghostty is that on the mac with Nano.. you can't copy and paste multiple lines into the editor. It's something about how the terminal handles "bracketed pasting".. but yet this isn't an issue with iterm2 and term.

I love 99% of what Ghostty brings to the table as a terminal replacement but the copy / paste issues with it are incredibly frustrating and I run into them almost daily.

Re: We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application

#170

Post by phkahler »

ozim wrote: post #130
microtonal wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't GTK and Qt (community edition) both LGPL (though different versions)? So Electron does not have downsides? Like far worse platform integration.

Well Qt license is not annoying. Qt the company is annoying because they make it super hard to use community edition and it is super annoying having per developer licensing with all kinds of super annoying BS one have to deal with when developing for Qt. For Electron I can get 20 devs hired tomorrow or I myself can start project right away and be up and running in minutes.

>> Well Qt license is not annoying.

Qt is a hodgepodge of many different components which have different licenses. This is made worse by Qt being an application development framework and not just a GUI toolkit. It includes much more than necessary and a lot of apps will use those other features and become tightly coupled with Qt. Not that its easy to switch toolkits, but it can be extra hard to move away from Qt.

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