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Ghostty 1.0

ghostty.org

251–260 of 719 posts

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#251
post #203

I might give this a shot but using GTK4 makes me think this won’t live up to the “native” claim on Linux. It will likely feel out of place on non-GTK DEs with KDE being the big one. And yes, I did read the about page disclaimer about Linux but strongly disagree about calling GTK4 the closest thing. That’s a very GNOME-centric view (e.g., ignores the rest of the Linux ecosystem) and makes me worry that any issues on o…

Does "native" exist on Linux, in your opinion? Feels to me like both QT and GTK (and maybe iced if cosmic comes to fruition?) could be considered native (or none of them can, depending on your point of view).

I’d answer this differently depending on when you ask. 10 years ago (random, but long enough number) I would have said an easy yes. Both GTK and QT would have been acceptable toolkits to use as the cross DE issues weren’t that many and bugs got fixed. Ask me a few years ago and I’d waver. It wasn’t clear how ecosystem friendly GTK4 would be, so I might have optimistically replied the same. But caveat it with a “maybe support both X11 and Wayland.” But ask me now and I’d say to earn the label *Linux native*, you would have to support a lot. GTK4 has proven to not play well with other DEs. The jump to Wayland has caused a fairly significant split in DEs (this year has greatly closed the gap with many showing great progress in supporting Wayland) which means some apps may not work on your DE of choice. And overall, I’d be hesitant to claim that any app is truly *Linux native* because installing an app no longer guarantees that it’ll just work and look and feel right. You’d need to have builds GTK4 & QT, and make sure that they work in both X11 and Wayland for the next few years. When I look for apps nowadays, I tend to append my DE and/or distribution to my search. I currently think it’s more truthful (on Linux) to say that an app is native to a DE instead of to Linux.

Note: I don’t think GTK4 is bad. One of the best parts of the Linux ecosystem is that we have a lot of great DEs that have gradually differentiated themselves by UX. GTK4 not playing well with others is in part due to how different GNOME’s UX is. The toolkit is meant to serve one DE paradigm now and that’s led to higher quality on that DE. The drawback to that diversification is that there is no easy way to support all DEs. Your toolkit drives what you support (unless you go out of your way to fix things that GTK4 isn’t fixing - which is why I put that bit about seeing how KDE issues would be addressed). The word “Linux”, now more than ever before, describes an ecosystem (or kernel) rather than an operating system.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#252
post #213

Landing page and github README could improve: - picture or gif is worth a thousand word - it mentioned its cross-platform but I don't see support for Windows or Android - its better make it explicit it's only for macOS and Linux. Yesterday was looking for some nicer terminal on Android and was hoping ghostty could work. - I like simple landing pages but this... is too simple and not much useful (only 2 buttons and AS…

Cross platform doesn't mean every single platform, and it is not common of terminals supporting android

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#253

Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that there is a good group of EXCELLENT terminals out there, and I'm not claiming Ghostty is strictly better than any of them. Ghostty has different design goals and tradeoffs and if it's right for you great, but if not, you have so many good choices. Shout out to Kitty, WezTerm, Foot in particular. iTerm2 gets some ha…

Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done and for sharing your passion project with us.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#254

I assume this is mostly a mac thing? The effort to get this up and running on debian appears to be a bit more work than normal.

Yeah, it's not available in the Debian/Ubuntu package managers, but building from source is quite trivial.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#255
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except it does? View -> Quick Terminal.

I've built from source on Linux, I don't use MacOS.

This just doesn't seem to work :(

quick-terminal-position=top quick-terminal-screen=main quick-terminal-autohide=false keybind=f9=toggle_quick_terminal

Edit: Joined the discord, turns out this feature is MacOS only :/

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#256

What am I missing? Can someone please explain what reason there is to switch/build a new terminal when we can use e.g. iTerm ?

I'm still using the built in MacOS terminal. What am I missing? I mostly do webdev - maybe terminal features are more important for other types of programming?

Apple Terminal has a lot of problems. As others have mentioned, it lacks support for 24 bit color, enforces minimum contrast ratios without any ability to disable them (meaning you cannot set arbitrary color themes), is hopelessly bad at Unicode rendering (particularly with multi-codepoint graphemes, see [1]), and in general misbehaves in other myriad ways [2][3][4].

With both Ghostty and iTerm2 now freely available, there's really no reason to use Terminal.app.

[1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals

[2]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/26093

[3]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/28776

[4]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/28453

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#257
Does this support the non-standard key-press, key-release, etc. events proposal by kitty project? They are necessary for nicer terminal UI projects.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks really awesome. I'm going to sound like I don't belong in the hipster terminal club, but the reason I shied away from some of the other terminals is the lack of tabs, which looks like yours has when I did a quick Google question/search. (if wezterm and the like have them, I must have missed it or it wasn't obviously apparent in the settings how to achieve them). I know everyone will say but tmux and/or native m…

I also use tmux, but I love the native tabs of Konsole in KDE. I have Shift-Arrow configured to move between them, it is far more comfortable than the dual shortcuts needed by tmux, Ctrl-B to call tmux's attention then l (if I remember correctly) to get to the last tab. Konsole also has easy resizing of text and supports images in the console, you might like it.

I am a happy konsole user. I have bookmarked all the tabs relevant to my project, in a folder. As soon as I start konsole, I open the folder in tabs.

Then as a ritual (and a bit of OCD), I quickly cycle through all the tabs with Shift-Right Arrow once.

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