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…
Can you please add an rss feed to your blog? Thanks for the amazing work
Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
301–310 of 372 posts
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#302I'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…
Do you think there's entry barrier, even if pride based or psychological, to the fact that libghostty is called so rather that something more generic? Let's say I'm the creator of Alacritty, would I have more problems adding libghostty than it's generically named identical counterpart libtermengine?
I'm not concerned with it.
The real goal isn't for Alacrity or Kitty or WezTerm or any other terminal to use libghostty. I think over the long term, terminal emulator user bases dwindle down to niche (but important) use cases.
The real goal is for higher-level tooling (GUI or browser) that utilizes terminal-like programs to have something like libghostty to reach for. I think this represents the much, much larger ecosystem out there that likely touches many more people. For example, Neovim's terminal mode, terminal multiplexers, PaaS build systems, agentic tooling, etc. You're seeing this emerge in force already with the awesome-libghostty repo.
libghostty would still be useful for traditional terminal emulators to replatform on, and for example xterm.js is seriously looking into it (and I'm happy to help and even offered their maintainer a maintainer spot on libghostty). But, they're not the goal. And if fragile egos hold people back, it's really not my problem, it's theirs.
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#303How'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.
According to this (at least 11 months old) benchmark, Ghostty has the worst input latency across all contenders: https://github.com/moktavizen/terminal-benchmark?tab=readme-... More benchmarks from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45253927 14 months old discussion of input latency in Ghostty with comments from the author: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/4837
The first link is a proper end-to-end benchmark with external camera (kudos to the author for making those), the second link is a more faulty software emulation
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the author of Trolley[0] (Electron for TUIs). It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality around it. Thanks for making it. [0]: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
I'm not quite understanding your project. What is the use case? Is this so I can package up an existing terminal app as a dedicated desktop app? If so that actually sounds really cool. I'd like a dedicated lazygit app in my tray at all times.
Yes, that's it. It came about after writing a small TUI for a friend to back up their Vimeo library. They liked the simplicity and speed but not having to use the shell. Didn't want to install Ghostty either.
So here we are
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, really? So I’ve used the terminal for everything for decades, and now, because of vibe coding, all The Kids have joined me? I don’t even know how to feel about that. Better terminals are nice though.
I think terminal workflows are intimidating for a lot of people, because the discoverability is lower than GUIs. You can't necessarily intuit how a CLI works, you have to read the documentation or watch a tutorial, which my 10 years in the IT industry has taught me a big barrier even for really experienced SWEs. The new coding TUIs are a more gentle introduction to that.
The program perhaps most responsible for the renewed interest in the terminal, Claude Code, is made with React. Life moves pretty fast.
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#306Bit of a shameless plug, but for those looking to configure Ghostty using an actual GUI, you can use this web tool I've been maintaining since the original closed beta of Ghostty https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#307Bit of a shameless plug, but for those looking to configure Ghostty using an actual GUI, you can use this web tool I've been maintaining since the original closed beta of Ghostty https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config
Thank you for dropping this link. I opened ghostty for the first same, then when preferences dropped me into a TUI editor with no syntax highlighting I closed it and reopened iTerm.
I liked the idea of a fast new terminal, but not enough to RTFM before figuring out if it was worth switching.
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#308Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#309When Ghostty was publicly announced, I used it for a few months and gave up on it due to the lack of support for the CMD+F feature that I use Terminal.app. This is a critical feature for me while tailing logs on my local. I tried the workaround of capturing the text into a text file and then searching it. It just didn't work for my workflow and dropped it. Ghostty is great otherwise. But, without the CMD+F, it's of n…
Same. Lack of search and lack of scrollbars make me wonder why this project got so much attention in the first place. iTerm2 seems way more capable.
I suspect it is "just" the very nice-looking default theme in Ghostty. I updated my iTerm2 colors with colors I picked from Tailwind‘s excellent color palette and iterm2 now feels fresh and has all the features I want.
Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Foot is worth a look. It’s the only terminal I’ve ever seen that starts up in sub-50ms cold, without a service already running. But you do have to run a proper window manager so you don’t have to require tab support in every single app. ;)
What proper window manager shows tab group list at the top of the current app window and allows shortcuts/mouse to reorder the list and also allows moving a tab outside of this list to another tab group?
Sway and i3. But when a WM does it, you can mix different apps in the same tab group, and your tab key binds can be the same as your WM key binds. You don’t have to remember alt+h for tabs, win+h for windows, etc.
But I’m just busting your chops, don’t listen to me. I don’t even use i3/Sway, or use tabs at all. Everyone has their own workflow that works best for them.