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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

ghostty.org

31–40 of 372 posts

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#31
For anyone using this terminal that hates != (and others) being turned into a single character, I have the following to turn off ligatures:

    font-feature = -dlig
    font-feature = -liga
    font-feature = -calt
This can be updated in `$HOME/.config/ghostty/config`.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#32

Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature.…

Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#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 this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders.

On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time.

Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.

Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time).

That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#34
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…

I don't know enough about these things to know why, but I have pretty much always had to hack $TERM to get things working smoothly with any remotely featureful terminal emulator. I have occasionally needed similar hacks for Kitty and urxvt, for example (though top and ncdu seem to work fine).

The way terminal applications handle different terminal emulators on Linux just seems to be a bit broken. I don't think it's a particular indictment of Ghostty or any one emulator.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#35

Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature.…

there's scrollback search in the nightly build if that's an option for you (I've been using it a ton for a few months and haven't seen any bugs so far):

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/releases/tag/tip

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#36

I enjoy it, and it’s great to have another modern high performance terminal as an option for macOS and Linux. For me, Kitty still has the edge: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ WezTerm is also a strong contender: https://wezterm.org/

When I tried Wezterm last year, you couldn't select more than 3-5 lines of text. I went to fix the 'bug', I found that it was intentional because it allocates a string and copies multiple times every time you click and drag.

Even if that's fixed, that design put me off the terminal forever.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#37
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…

> 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. I think you're looking for the `toggle_split_zoom` binding which has existed since Ghostty 1.0 and is default bound to `cmd+shift+enter` on macOS which is the same binding as iTerm. It's also visible in the menu and command palette. We recently added a kind of spli…

Can I take advantage of you being here and express some desiderata?

1. The quick terminal feature is ghostty's killer feature for me, I switched to ghostty because of it. Could we make it first-class feature? Like, i'd love to have tabs over there too (like in guake/yakuake).

2. I have a white on black theme (white text on black background) but when i split vertically/horizontally, the borders between one shell and the next are not really visible and I have an hard time resizing them... Can you do something about it? Setting the colors of borders would be an okay fix for me.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#38

Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature.…

Scrollback does exist on Ghostty! But you need to switch to “tip”. This can be done in the config file. The tip build is very stable and has many bugs fixed (like various memory leaks).

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#39

Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like. WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature.…

Scroll back search is coming. You can try it in the nightly.

I'll wait for the stable release and will retest it. Not in a rush and not the early adopter kind of guy.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#40

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.

I have been using computers and terminal for a long time, and this kind of comment makes me think I must have missed a whole bunch of things which can be done with a terminal
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