A few months ago, a new terminal emulator was released. It’s called ghostty, and it has been a highly anticipated terminal emulator for a while, especially due to the coverage that it received from ThePrimeagen, who had been using for a while, while it was in private beta.
I tried it out on Fedora a few months ago and I found alacritty felt faster in nvim. So i stayed on alacritty.
Honestly, I rather like the default XFCE terminal. In fact, I was using it even before I used XFCE back when I was just playing with the default GNOME in VMs before I daily-drove Linux.
Is it crazy that I just use the default provided terminal emulator (Fedora/Gnome)? Why would I use something like this?
If you like the default terminal use it for me i use terminals like this due to the gpu acceleration and stuff
If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.
Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).
Oh, yeah. If it’s your primary work environment I can see how you could use such features. I use the terminal maybe 1-2 per day, so it’s not a priority for me. Thanks for clarifying!
This feels like a paid advertisement ”review” to me. There is basically nothing negative or critical at all. No places to improve? Here is the most critical bit in the entire post:
If you use GNOME, you should definitely be giving Ghostty a try. To be completely fair, I did not dislike using it on my other KDE Plasma — based machine either, but it does not feel as “native” yet. One day it will, though…
Mmmmm 😕
In support is that, I’d point to
As you keep navigating through the hamburger menu, one thing you will notice is that, unlike on the default GNOME terminal, there is no graphical Settings menu to speak of here. The reason for that is that Ghostty is so customizable that it would have been pretty much impossible to provide a practical GUI to expose all its configuration options: you need the full expressivity of a configuration file for that.
as making a virtue out of a lack. I really don’t buy that “impossible” line. It was just too much work or work they during want to do.
I use this Terminal emulator on a daily basis main reason due to GPU acceleration while having tabbing
Since the review doesn’t mention any downsides I’m gonna go ahead and share one. This might seem like a tiny thing but relatively slow startup turned out to be a total deal breaker for me. In my workflow, I open and close a lot of terminal windows. Sometimes I spawn terminals just for a few seconds to run a single command and then close them. Kitty and Alacritty launch instantaneously whereas Ghostty has a noticeable lag which was just infuriating to me. Also, it doesn’t have any useful (for me) features not present in Kitty so yeah, I guess it’s not for me.
I thought you were going to talk about the lack of terminal scrollback.
And search.
This is why I use
footin its client-server mode. It allows basically instant startup because the server is already running in the background (even on my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad).The foot clan is strong
We’re everywhere!
Why does it have a GTK dependacy? It makes it noticeably slower to open on KDE compared to kitty
Man I just don’t feel the hype for it. On macOS I love iterm2 and on Linux I love kitty.
Ghostty is amazing on macOS. On Linux, it’s basically another GTK terminal emulator with a lot of nice configuration options, but nothing that special.
Starting to feel like a boomer with st/dmenu on xorg.
actual boomer here with foot on sway
It does the job. And does it well.
st is missing every feature besides displaying text and ansi escape codes
Ghostty has lots of issues ssh-ing into remote systems that aren’t on the bleeding edge.
I couldn’t get it to work reasonably well enough for me and tried a bunch of others. Currently using Alacritty on both my Linux desktop workstation and Mac Laptop.
I use Zellij anyway and it has all the tab/pane/floating window support I was looking for.
Just gotta adjust your TERM value. You can do it per host in your ssh config, if you don’t wanna set it globally.
SetEnv TERM=xterm-256colorYep - but seeing the thread about it in their github repo was also a turn off. I don’t have to do it with other clients.
I also believe that has to happen on each server - and we’ve got a lot of servers. I’m not particularly keen on needing to change anything to get my terminal emulator to, well, work.
While I get the ghostty team’s PoV - I don’t agree with it.
That’s fair, I get the frustration.
I guess I’ve been cutting Mitchell some slack since this is a passion project for him - his goal was to build the modern terminal he always wanted, so an opinionated feature set was always expected. And, new terminals with actual new features need their own terminfo entries, it just comes with the territory. It’ll sort itself out as the databases catch up.
For now, though, you don’t need to address this on an individual host level. I’m in the same boat at work with thousands of servers. If you want to give Ghostty another shot, this wrapper handles the issue automatically, even for servers where AcceptEnv doesn’t include TERM or where SetEnv is disabled:
ssh() { if [[ "$TERM" == "xterm-ghostty" ]]; then TERM=xterm-256color command ssh "$@" else command ssh "$@" fi }Just drop it in your
.bashrc(orfunctions.shif you rock a modular setup) and SSH connections will auto-switch to compatible terminfo while keeping your local session full-featured. Best of both worlds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯I really appreciate your response. It’s incredibly helpful and deeply thoughtful. Thank you.
What comes next is not directed at you but rather provides some other color based on a few things you touched on.
I worked for the guy. He gets no slack from me. He changed my life in many ways both wonderful and not. And while it’s unlikely I’d work with or for him again he was a net positive in my life.
I don’t see product the way he sees product which is exactly as you note: it’s for him. Some of that “for him” approach has resonated deeply with the OSS community and still does. He changed Cloud Computing in the best of ways. He’s a giant. And we’re lucky he’s around.
This small ghostty issue (and some others I can’t recall now) was emblematic of our core disagreement about how we build systems for a broader user base. That’s why I said I get their PoV but disagree with it. I think it would be fair to say using the product reminded me a lot about this particular tension. Reading the GitHub issues even more so. That’s wholly on me.
I am thankful to ghostty for helping me explore many more options. I had been using iterm2 on my laptop and struggling to find something I liked on my Linux workstation. Checking out the new hotness after all the hype still resulted in a net positive.
Nevertheless I am genuinely happy it’s working for you and, again, thanks for your kind and calm response.
I tried this one and Wezterm, but I just couldn’t get past how much vram they use, when vram is still at a premium. Konsole works really well for me anyway, so I guess I don’t see the appeal.
Though, I do like Wezterm’s lua config.
It is very good, and I am currently using it. I don’t like its dependencies on GTK stuff, the developer is a little picky about what to support, and I dislike the
+optionsstyle. Other than that, 👍 .Also great: Wezterm, Konsole, Rio. I’m excitedly following Rio’s development, which has a much smaller dependency list, and hopping back and forth between it and Ghostty/Wezterm. But it’s still got some things to iron out and features to develop.
Rio as in Plan 9?
I give it a spin every month or so to see how it’s getting on. I’m on macOS.
Every time I walk away unimpressed, despite its maker’s very deserved esteemed reputation.
I’m probably not seeing something. What I do see, however, is that I can’t search my scrollback history, nor can I select text without a mouse.
Also, pressing
cmd+,on macOS opens the config inside TextEditor (yes, a separate GUI app) rather than in$EDITOR. It’s a small thing but I couldn’t figure out how to change it. Coming from Kitty, this drove me mad.I’m not sure who Ghostty is for. My feeling is it’s aiming to be an excellent, polished experience for casual terminal users. But I didn’t see anything that Kitty or just tmux anywhere can’t do.
The article says it can debug TUIs, similar to what the browser’s debug panel does for web apps. That is useful for TUI developers.
Other than that, I don’t know either what Kitty is missing.
On my MacBook Ghostty is fucking awesome!! Testing several for the macOs these past weeks and so far it’s still at the top.
Yeah. A lot of the extra nice things about Ghostty come from native macOS features. It’s a very different story on Linux, but still a solid terminal emulator there as well.
Solid review. Just installed on my Mac. Started up very quickly. Looks nice. I’ll use it as my daily driver for a few days and see how it feels.
