Live data from Hacker News

Ghostty 1.0

ghostty.org

621–630 of 719 posts

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#621

As someone who uses the default terminal app, I'm curious to learn about other people's use-cases where the choice of terminal app makes a difference and how.

Very impressed with ghostty so far, but: Main reasons for sticking with ITerm2 (for the moment at least):

- "Seamless" cut & paste with paste on "2 X right click" + "Trim trailing LF"

- Quadruple click "Smart selection"

- Brillant search with highlighting in text and scrollbar

- Support for OSC-1 "icon titles" in tabs, as opposed to OSC-0 "header title"

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#623
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great approach. Not sure on the current state of Alacritty, but a few years back the suggested solution for users interested in battery performance was to switch to a different terminal emulator: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/3473#issuecomm...

This is the Alacritty answer to a lot of queries. I took the advice, eventually.

Yep. That comment was when I stopped using Alacritty.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#624
post #615
post #64

After a quick test this looks incredibly good and fast. I'll use it as a terminal for the next weeks to see how it goes, but I have good feelings. Thank you so much for writing it. EDIT: WOOOW, for me this is going to be a game changer. I was just working at Redis stuff outputting a ton of debugging info and results, and normally the terminal was the bottleneck, and here instead it printed half million of results in…

[dead]

These benchmarks are all flawed.

You can't measure input latency properly without a camera (or pixel access to the screen but then have to be careful it's not impacting your benchmark). The latency benchmark is just testing VT IO throughput for a specific zsh prompt. Not at all related to input latency.

The plaintext IO benchmark is suspiciously slow for both Alacritty and Ghostty relative to Kitty. I ran the same on my machine and got within 15% between all three. They're all fast but something looks wrong here. I also have issue with the contents, which aren't representative in my opinion of human output (that's why I like to use books as my plaintext IO benchmark). This changes things.

The memory usage doesn't explain the setup at all, nor exactly how memory is read (I'm not sure what the `mem` column is reading in btop). Memory usage on macOS is tricky to benchmark because the OS tries very hard to _not free memory_. As a macOS kernel guy told me once: "freed memory is wasted memory" [so long as you're not using all memory]. There are other metrics you can get out of the kernel to get accurate _allocated and used memory_. Activity Monitor exposes these well. (EDIT: Just realized the tests were on Linux, which should be better, so this might be okay but test setup still matters here)

I'm not saying any are directionally wrong, and I'm also not trying to claim Ghostty is the fastest (I don't, I claim it's just "fast", not the fastest). But this is not good benchmarking.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#625
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, it's convenience. fair enough. i'm just trying to make sense of why it is so popular on hn. i often see stuff rated to mount everest here and i just don't get it. and then i'm wondering is it me? or is it them? am i one of those weak engineers who just don't know what's going on? that's all.

[flagged]

Please don't be snarky or cross into personal attack. We're trying for the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#626
post #64

After a quick test this looks incredibly good and fast. I'll use it as a terminal for the next weeks to see how it goes, but I have good feelings. Thank you so much for writing it. EDIT: WOOOW, for me this is going to be a game changer. I was just working at Redis stuff outputting a ton of debugging info and results, and normally the terminal was the bottleneck, and here instead it printed half million of results in…

Really need scrollback search though. Was a bit surprised it was launched without that.

See https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomme...

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#627
post #564

> Split Right | Split Down Thanks for this. After 7 years of using iterm2 I still don't know what will happen with the ambiguous "Split Horizontally | Split Vertically". I know the issue is I'm thinking about it and should just learn it, but it would be more helpful if it was named "Split A | Split B". (might be a non-native language problem)

I’m a native English speaker and I also have trouble with this. When the panes are arranged horizontally, the line dividing them is vertical.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a minute for me, but it did find it. Something is off with macOS indexing. Any app that you install via brew takes a bit to show up.

I'm not complaining about the indexing (you can start the indexing by starting spotlight on and off). I'm complaining about having to search for "ghos..." instead of "term...". Because I don't don't like to remember the specific app name. But this complaint is the same for everything; when searching for Excel, I would like "Numbers" to also show up in the results. When looking for vscode I would like "Visual Studio c…

Huh, you've got me curious, and the Windows start menu does in fact launch Visual Studio Code when searching for "vscode." Color me pleasantly surprised!

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#629
post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

These benchmarks are all flawed. You can't measure input latency properly without a camera (or pixel access to the screen but then have to be careful it's not impacting your benchmark). The latency benchmark is just testing VT IO throughput for a specific zsh prompt. Not at all related to input latency. The plaintext IO benchmark is suspiciously slow for both Alacritty and Ghostty relative to Kitty. I ran the same on…

...And you can also cc this your comment to the issues section of the provided repo, so that the author could answer these points and possibly improve their benchmarking process :).

---

> I claim it's just "fast"

Me, I have three terminal emulators installed on my main machine, alacritty, kitty and xterm. Definitely haven't noticed anything "game changing" (as mentioned in the comment above) from ghostty in this regard.

Re: Ghostty 1.0

#630
post #455
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can use glsl shaders with Ghostty including this CRT one to mimic what cool retro does https://github.com/m-ahdal/ghostty-shaders/blob/main/crt.gls...

Will these work on MacOS or does it use metal for the mac version?

I'm using them on a new mac mini. Haven't tried on my older intel mac mini yet though.
Post reply on HN