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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

ghostty.org

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Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#171

Post by submeta »

Ghostty is fast and feels native, but WezTerm occupies a different niche: it's a terminal you program rather than configure.

The Lua config isn't just "dynamic" in the abstract sense. I built a tmuxinator-style workspace manager that spawns project-specific layouts - named tabs, splits, working directories, startup commands - from a fuzzy launcher. Session state auto-saves every 10 minutes with timestamped snapshots and crash recovery. Theme toggling between dark and light mode triggers a system-wide theme switch script. These are runtime behaviors, not static settings - try doing any of that in TOML.

The built-in multiplexer is the other major differentiator. Splits, directional navigation, pane zoom, pane selection with alphabet overlays, moving panes between tabs or windows, all without a tmux prefix key. It's not just "WezTerm has splits too, it's that the interaction model is fundamentally more fluid when there's no mode switching.

WezTerm isn't trying to be the fastest terminal. It's trying to be the most programmable one, and for people who want their terminal to work as a development environment rather than a PTY renderer, that tradeoff is worth it.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#173

Post by nine_k »

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!

/* Claude Code is the strongest case of the return to the mainframe: a closed, bespoke, paid service that nothing locally run compares to. Terminals are just a natural part of the mainframe world! */

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#174

Post by blorenz »

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…

Excited to see the further development of libghostty! It is an exciting project in this new world of being able to develop your own agentic development environments rather effortlessly. These things are possible because of projects like yours. Thank you!

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#175

Post by bewuethr »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #99
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…

Random advice question. My brother taught himself to program and has been making a terminal-based game. What started out small has turned into a highly polished game with ascii art, sound, you name it. I’ve been trying to figure out how I could actually help him distribute it and I keep coming back to the best option being to wrap his programs terminal output into a host process that can emulate and render it. It see…

Maybe as an SSH app? See https://snakes.run for a recent example.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#176

Post by drcongo »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #160

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 g…

This is a very weird take. For people who spend their entire day in the terminal, having the right terminal is incredibly important. Like saying track athletes shouldn't spend money on running shoes if they own a pair of slippers.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#177

Post by gigatexal »

operatingthetan wrote: post #165
gigatexal wrote: post #101

Bigger than ghostty is libghostty which enables things like: https://www.cmux.dev/

I tried it when it last had an HN post (a week ago?) and found it to be very buggy and went straight back to Ghostty.

what bugs did you hit? I have been using it a few days now no issues.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#178

Post by bewuethr »

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.

Have you seen the `ssh-terminfo` option for shell integration? https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#shell-integration-...

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#179

Post by makeramen »

linsomniac wrote: post #157
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.

Zellij has been holding me over with tabs and panes (in quick terminal) while I wait for them to come to ghostty directly.

Tabs (and panes? I haven't tried yet) should work fine for regular terminal windows though.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#180

Post by stevenhuang »

yearolinuxdsktp wrote: post #84
stonegray wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this isn’t the job of the emulator. You can do this all in `tmux` for example. As for editing text, ghostty+tmux most definitely supports editing text with the mouse (even an in terminal right click menu!) although sounds like your intended use of select to delete isn’t common so you’ll need to do some customizations.

I’ve been using scroll back search for 15+ years with Terminal.app and iTerm2, and there’s no way that’s not the job of the terminal. You don’t know how good that is until you use it.

Tmux does it better
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