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Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

ghostty.org

51–60 of 372 posts

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#51

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…

[flagged]

while I agree, the comment you just replied to says:

> 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

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#52
I tried this out after getting annoyed for the 100th time by a recent bug in kgx/console that will occasionally fail to launch windows leaving incomplete windows as tabs.

Console has long since become abandonware pushing people towards ptyxis which is now the default gnome terminal. A damn shame considering console is basically complete software (the quality of software in gnome is on a downhill).

I would have given ptyxis a chance if they didn't take a basic terminal and added some fluff (features related to distrobox) on top of other annoying things I can't be bothered to remember about because I ended up removing the software every time I gave it a spin.

In just a few days I've been able to replace console with ghostty-nightly and I don't miss anything.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#55
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…

It sounds like you simply forgot to update your terminfo on your remote system. You must do this if your chosen terminal requires settings that are not compatible with "xterm-256color". Alacritty, kitty, and wezterm also require this, as they implement features that xterm doesn't (and most likely never will), if your terminfo DB is too old to already include them. Using Alacritty as an example, you'd take a file that…

It might be a bug in remote handling and I might have unfairly called out GhostTTY for this, but "forgetting to update terminfo on my remote system" just doesn't hold with the way I work.

I work managing different systems for different clients and often login to systems for the first time. The servers aren't mine, and configuring something like Ansible to configure my home just seems like a waste of time for little benefit. It means that generally I end up using systems that are likely to be already instead - Bash not zsh, Perl, basic vim without any bindings. It might sound special but I'm sure I'm far from the only person working this way.

So given this, I'd always prefer a terminal that doesn't require me to change remote servers. In this particular case I can modify $TERM in my local .zshrc and it works fine so it's a moot point, but if I had to modify the remote system it would be a no go.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#56

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.

Very glad for that--it's what made me stop my evaluation the first time around. I looked for the feature in issues and just saw #9821 about memory use of the buffer which could be an issue if configuring very large scrollback as I do.

BTW is there feature parity between macOS and Linux, e.g. scrollback buffer searching on Linux?

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#57

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.…

> Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux.

Another option is to leave the tabbing to your window manager.

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#58

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…

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

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#59

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…

Thanks for all the work you do! I had used terminal just a few dozen times before November — and now i am in terminal more than any app (even more than the web browser).

It’s common for me to have 15-25 different terminal windows open for using Claude code. I shifted to Ghostty because I was looking for more features.

Unfortunately, none of the features I wanted are available anywhere (though I’ve come to appreciate Ghostty anyway). Here’s what I had wanted:

1. Basic text editing features (ie click to place cursor in the text input field; highlight to delete)

2. Change colors or fonts mid session (to make it easier to find particular windows)

3. Window management and search (eg, a way to find my windows when I lose them and to otherwise control them)

Apparently, it is really hard to develop features like these for terminal emulators. I’d love to understand why…

Re: Ghostty – Terminal Emulator

#60

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.

Been using/abusing wezterm for years, my scrollback is set to 1000000 and text selection has never been a problem... copy mode however does make it even easier
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