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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

ghostty.org

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Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#231

Post by fartfeatures »

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…

Is there any chance of a stable release that fixes the memory leak issue? I know I could run nightly but for something I spend all day every day using I'd much rather run a stable version.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#232

Post by mitchellh »

fartfeatures wrote: post #231
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…

Is there any chance of a stable release that fixes the memory leak issue? I know I could run nightly but for something I spend all day every day using I'd much rather run a stable version.

New stable release in 1 to 2 weeks.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#233

Post by loeg »

cess11 wrote: post #100
loeg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen anyone else mention Terminology yet. It uses an unconventional GUI framework (Enlightenment / EFL), but that aside, it's fast and has more or less all of the features you'd expect of a terminal: https://github.com/borisfaure/terminology Its "moment" as a new novel terminal was over a decade ago, but it still chugs on working just fine. Notably(?), gregkh uses it (or used to use it): https://www.linuxfo…

Back in 2018 I thought it felt kind of sluggish and consumed quite a bit of resources, but looked pretty. Have they improved on performance since then?

Are you sure you're thinking of the same terminal? Its standout feature has been performance. Granted, that was 10+ years ago, but I've never noticed it regressing.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#234

Post by orsorna »

I've only ever stuck with urxvt and more recently foot since moving to Wayland. On Mac the default terminal works for me, though I've been using Ghostty to follow a trend, but I seriously don't understand the benefits netted to me? (other than the cool icon)

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#235

Post by scuff3d »

mitchellh wrote: post #223
scuff3d wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's it been like managing a fairly large project with Zig? I know you've spoken highly of the language in the past, but recently it seems like Zig has been through some substantial changes that would be relevant to a terminal emulator. I'm curious how painful the churn has been for project maintainers.

It's been extremely good. I should really blog about it in more detail because I do get asked this question regularly. It's been very good. The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see…

That's super interesting to hear. I see people say all the time "oh I would never use it in a big project because it's changing so fast", but then see awesome projects like Ghostty and Tiger Beatle written in it, so clearly they're doing something right.

I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#236

Post by xeonmc »

mitchellh wrote: post #111
WD-42 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ama…

Would a terminal deal with them have added another billion to your account if it hadn’t been nonprofit?

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#237

Post by mitchellh »

scuff3d wrote: post #235
mitchellh wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been extremely good. I should really blog about it in more detail because I do get asked this question regularly. It's been very good. The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see…

That's super interesting to hear. I see people say all the time "oh I would never use it in a big project because it's changing so fast", but then see awesome projects like Ghostty and Tiger Beatle written in it, so clearly they're doing something right. I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing…

Yes, LLMs with Zig are absolutely useless without agentic behaviors. Throw an agent in the mix and it's totally fine. Bonus points if you pair it with some basic agent skills so it knows how to look up language references, stdlib files, etc. then it does even better.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#238

Post by commandersaki »

orsorna wrote: post #234

I've only ever stuck with urxvt and more recently foot since moving to Wayland. On Mac the default terminal works for me, though I've been using Ghostty to follow a trend, but I seriously don't understand the benefits netted to me? (other than the cool icon)

I stayed with Terminal.app for quite awhile. Until very recently (not when Ghostty was released) it didn't have 24-bit colour support. It also didn't have shell integrations such as triple click to select all output of the last command. The configuration system is arse and is kind of a lock-in as it is in all plist form, so I had a hard time extracting the colours I used for my terminal and using them elsewhere.

Now that they've updated it recently, it is a better terminal, but otherwise Ghostty has a few bells and whistles that make the experience nicer.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#240

Post by novok »

mitchellh wrote: post #223
scuff3d wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's it been like managing a fairly large project with Zig? I know you've spoken highly of the language in the past, but recently it seems like Zig has been through some substantial changes that would be relevant to a terminal emulator. I'm curious how painful the churn has been for project maintainers.

It's been extremely good. I should really blog about it in more detail because I do get asked this question regularly. It's been very good. The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see…

Do you get frustrated in using a low training data language like zig with AI models? I've noticed that models tend to be better with languages like TypeScript than Swift because of issues like that.
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