These are Ghostty GUI release notes, but I want to take a moment to highlight the libghostty progress we've made since Ghostty 1.3.
As a reminder, libghostty is the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more. I always felt that a free, high qualty, lightweight, reusable terminal emulation core would benefit the developer world more than any single GUI application. And that is playing out!
It is and always was my true purpose with the Ghostty project (I said this in my first ever talk about Ghostty!). I've jokingly said many times that Ghostty GUI is just a glorified tech demo for libghostty. That's not fair though, because GUI is great and there are really talented people working on it.
Since I started the project, Ghostty has always gotten people saying "I don't understand why you'd start a terminal emulator today." Well, the answer is libghostty. It's truly unique and its enabling something special (imo!).
Highlights of libghostty since 6 months ago (none of the below was true 6 months ago):
- Libghostty has nearly 100% coverage of all of Ghostty's core (and you can compile with flags to remove any of these features for size/safety): https://libghostty.tip.ghostty.org/
- Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS), Windows (MSVC and GNU), Linux, FreeBSD, Android, WebAssembly, and freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).
- Libghostty has bindings in pretty much every popular programming language: C, Zig, Go, Swift, Python, Rust, .NET, etc.
- Libghostty's memory requirements have dramatically shrunk to enable the portability above. There's still work to do but a single empty terminal now takes 90% less memory. And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.
- Libghostty's speed is used by Antithesis to fuzz popular terminal programs and has directly led to hundreds of bug fixes sent upstream to programs such as tmux, btop, shells, and other terminal emulators. :)
Libghostty is really successfully turning into the tide that raises all boats. As it becomes more popular, Ghostty itself gets more performant and stable, and so does everyone else. It is also a vehicle for delivering modern terminal emulation to the widest source possible.
I plan on tagging libghostty 1.0 in the next few months and declaring ABI stability at that point!
Because of your multiple "I am tired of saying this, but this text was written by me and not an LLM" in your blog posts, I want to tell you that I read it word for word. :D I know this comment adds not much but I felt it needed to be said.
One almost forgets how easy it is to read a wall of text when it was written by a human. This was nice to read (also because you can feel it's got care behind it).
I'm from the KDE project, and have been working on a new frontend built on libghostty-vt to hopefully one day ease our maintenance burden.
It's been a quite smooth experience, and I remain very excited about the lib. I believe you are successfully setting the standard. Big congrats for your 1.4.0!
It'll be a new app, but it does provide a drop-in replacement for konsolepart (along with also having a QML module API for embeds into Qt Quick-based app, closing a gap Konsole currently leaves open). I'm sure it'll be some time before it would be ready to replace Konsole as default, also because conversations like that take some time and are a community process.
Thank you for your work on this. When I was working on neovim core and started dealing more and more with the edge cases of libvterm and terminal emulation in general, I had the same thought "we should just have a gold standard library for this." But that was 6/7 years ago (2019) and a lot of stuff happened in that interim unrelated to engineering that demotivated me from pursuing it.
Periodically, I would run into TUI issues and think "I should just finally do it," especially around wanting to replace tmux in general. But I knew from experience the long tail of annoying issues for terminals that it's more time consuming than it appears, and so I again never bothered.
Thanks for the good work to raise all boats :)
I tend to move away from terminal emulation towards GUI when I can (and using custom remote protocols somewhat inspired by arcan), but TUI is still useful for a while. I actually had a need for a good terminal emulation library for the fallback TUI/pty attachment for non-gui programs for my supervisor, so I'll try out libghostty.
Just wanted to say thank you for all your contributions to our industry, Mitchell. I love Ghostty and your vision here, and evangelize it whenever I can.
Agreed on the value of libghostty. I switched from vterm to ghostel recently and it's solved some refresh issues I previously had with vterm when using CLI coding agents in emacs.
Okay, that's fun:) ...so if I use this on an ESP* with a physical display and keyboard attached, at what point does it stop counting as a terminal emulator again?:)
> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).
I am really impressed. When I had read your original comment, I literally shouted oye! (meaning woah) because of how interesting it felt. Glad that I can see the demo as well.
But aside from the fun little demo, what are the real use cases that we can think of as well.
here are some that I have thought of
1. SSH'ing into a terminal (VPS) or being able to view what the AI agents are doing on that VPS and controlling them very thinly in your pocket.
2. I have a slight dream that I'd like to chip in but I always wanted to create something like monkeytype but on embedded-hardware. Something which can just plug to TV's and people can connect a keyboard and start to type.
3. Or another idea but being a book reader and having it connect to some library resource
(2) & (3) for the underdeveloped regions.
Maybe (1) can be good as well and could very well be a small computer terminal which can teach/help the underdeveloped regions.
I live in India and I see it first hand how genuinely just want to create some extremely minimalist software on extremely cheap hardware to make funding of them easier and more scalable.
This also makes the constraints work good as one of the govt's basically spent a lot of money providing mid/high end tablets to every children and it turned out to be quite catastrophic because although it was kiosked because it was just intended to watch videos or read resources.
Children paid people to crack it and then started using instagram on it. My mother is a govt. teacher and she strongly thinks that it was a waste of resources and even the parents of the children and local village meeting committees think so as well. I remember reading some local news articles about villages conducting meetings on how to prevent their children from such instagram addiction so quickly after the tabs were given.
I would like to hope that maybe someday someone creates the more optimal solution to the problems that I discussed and libghostty comes handy to the situation. Thanks for making it and have a nice day :-D
terminal emulation seems to keep playing a central role not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a replacement
I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it
Any plans for Ghostty to have the history of the terminal window reloaded on restart? Like the Mac native terminal app does? I am a heavy terminal user with a lot of tabs open, and after I restart the computer for whatever reason, I would like to have my terminal(s) as I left them.
Zig is also a C compiler
Here’s an example of Zig building some C code:
hello.c
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main(int argc, char **argv) {
> printf("Hello world\n");
> return 0;
> }
$ zig build-exe hello.c -lc
$ ./hello
> Hello world
I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.
If I don't want to use the wave of "venture backed ghostty wrappers" for remote mobile coding similar to Claude Code remote, what options do I have? Any plans for a first party remote solution that's not SSH?
Although not necessarily advertised as such, I've been successfully using alacritty in several projects injecting terminals into things both serious and silly.
I wouldn’t say it’s better, because that’s very subjective, but it is more “feature complete”. Alacritty is very minimal and rejects community PRs for features often driven by their general ethos. libghostty supports a lot of features I don’t foresee making their way into Alacritty.
I use Alacritty and GNOME Terminal. I don’t have a great reason for not using or trying Ghostty other than I have a minor aversion to Zig. (Again, not a great reason and arguably a not good reason)
I've tried Ghostty and it's great, but Kitty's hints mode[1] is the one feature keeping me from switching from Kitty to Ghostty. There are quite a few discussions around this and similar features in the Ghosstty-org/ghostty Discussions[2] which I follow. Most of them are references from ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2394[3]. Maybe now that Ghostty has finished implementing Kitty graphics hints will be next .
Yeah this is what is keeping me from using ghostty. Unfortunately I think that discussion is dead and no one agrees on the design of the three or so separate parts. I maintain a fork with quick select for my own purposes but I can’t use it at work.
Konsole is a fantastic and very mature terminal emulator, but it does have some real gaps that reveal its age.
The Qt toolkit that most KDE software is based on at some point introduced a next-gen toolkit-within-a-toolkit called Qt Quick, which most of our newer apps are written in. However, in its library form Konsole can only be embedded into apps that use the old gen toolkit. This is a real impediment to some efforts.
The old gen toolkit also typically doesn't use Vulkan or OpenGL for rendering, and so Konsole's terminal renderer doesn't either. Konsole's real-world performance during use is arguably just fine, but it does leave a lot of performance and battery life on the table.
libghostty also has somewhat wider support for newer stuff like Kitty protocols, even though Konsole certainly trumps it in support for older stuff (like sixels).
There's some other shortcomings to Konsole that are not inherent to the technology, like accessibility support not quite being where it should be.
And while the default UI is, in most distros, OK, there sure is a lot of spiderwebs and spacebar heating lurking in the settings dialogs (of which there are strangely many). It's also a bit dated vs. our HIG at the moment.
Which is to say, these projects can and do have a point, especially if they provide a nice library instead of hoarding all the good to themselves.
A couple of annoyances I've had shipping CLI apps to Konsole users:
1. By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support. Users can enable it manually, but you need to ship fallbacks by default since otherwise the default users will have a broken experience. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc all ship working OSC8 support out of the box.
2. No built-in Nerd Font support, so if you want to render icons, you need to tell your users to set up a patched font or else have fallbacks. Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.
That being said Konsole is much better than most emulators. iTerm2 is not bad, although it lacks Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support (which all of the above have, including Konsole, and which is very useful for drawing prettier terminal UIs). The worst by far is Apple Terminal, truly the IE6 of terminal emulators.
What's so bad about Apple Terminal? I've tried iTerm2 and others but never found a compelling reason to use them over the stock app. I don't live in the terminal like some do, though.
1. The Kitty keyboard protocol, which makes it impossible to distinguish e.g. Shift-Enter from Enter
2. OSC8 hyperlinks
3. It breaks on APC queries, so you need special handling to not emit them
4. Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support
5. The Kitty Terminal Graphics Protocol (or sixel)
6. OSC 9 notifications (or any of the later versions)
and a bunch of other stuff, this is just off the top of my head. For a long time they didn't even support 24-bit color, although they fixed that in Tahoe.
It's totally fine for basic UNIX tooling, but pretty painful if you're trying to make nice interactive TUIs.
I believe that the default behavior should be to never open a link without a confirmation from the user that this may be done.
This should be enough to avoid malicious links. I do not believe that completely disabling links is a good default, because they are very frequently useful when you read some text file in the terminal window.
Yes, I agree. Ghostty et al don't open-on-click, but on hover they'll show you the URL and there's a keyboard shortcut + click to open. This is much better UX than disabling OSC8.
"One implementation of a feature had a bug, therefore this feature should be turned off on all implementations by default" is probably not going to convince people who think the feature is good.
If you don't want to be able to have clickable hyperlinks, by all means use Konsole — no one is forcing you to use Ghostty. But if you want to know why people like Ghostty's approach vs Konsole's, it's because Ghostty pushes terminal emulator features forward and is low latency. Konsole is low latency and adopts some but not all features that other people invent. It's a noticeable difference and so people who like the feature part of the former like Ghostty/WezTerm/Kitty more than Konsole. If you don't care or dislike that part, and want a more conservative terminal (that is also low latency), Konsole and many others further on the conservative spectrum exist.
1) Personal preferences: different terminals come with different defaults, some people do not want to tinker with the settings, so they just stick with whatever immediately clicks.
2) Technical curiosity: some people probably started their own terminal project just for the fuck of having made their own - and they eventually gained a userbase.
3) Feature set: Most terminals implement most features these days, but at the time these projects started, you'd have a feature matrix between features and terminals because most terminals lacked some features; so people would pick whatever suited their needs.
Personally I've been using kitty for years mostly due to 3), at the time I chose my forever terminal, I evaluated like 12 different ones, and kitty was the only one that covered most of my needs without feeling like it suffers from random quirks, and I like that it has built-in terminal multiplexer (a'la tmux) and emoji picker.
The terminal ecosystem needs to change, and these terminals support a lot of cool features. Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth, Kitty graphics, Wezterm and its mux domains & lua config, lots of cool ideas there.
Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that
> Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth
Can you please explain what this means? I have Ghostty installed just as a backup to use when I have terminal saturation in my default (MacOS Terminal). But other than being super responsive, I don’t know why people love it so. Perhaps I’m missing something large and compelling.
I assume the quote is referring to libghostty. In which case a lot of different tools like vs code, Emacs, Gvim, Intellij and other IDEs, even web consoles on stuff like Azure essentially use and reimplement the same core, the idea behind libghostty is to replace those with a common component where long term development can better support the needs of all terminals.
In terms of ghostty itself its just a highly competent use of libghostty, Mitchell’s message above about it being a tech demo is tongue and cheek, but its not far off from the truth. It is just a really solid no bells and whistles, bar excellent execution, terminal emulator that uses libghostty.
Terminal state machine parsing is a very tricky thing, especially when you have people defining arbitrary protocols to interact with it. So having one implementation simplifies the development a lot. Of course this buys you into their ecosystem and whatever ghostty specifically supports etc.
A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one
It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.
When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.
So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.
I might not be using the correct terms. But, here is what I was seeing:
- in a running session text display would slow down intermittently. Like 2-3 words a second
- occasionally terminal would stop, some times in the middle of showing a response, and would need to restart the terminal to get it back. But I tailed the session logs and Claude code didn’t think anything was amiss. It was proceeding like normal
After switching to Ghostty these issues went away and has been rock solid since then.
For me: it doesn't really "bring" anything more than what I expect from a terminal.
In Mac, we had the default terminal app which has some problems with TUI apps and other small issues. iTerm2 is the replacement that most users use, but it become too bloated with useless features and AI, while it was hard to keep a good config file that I could share between devices. Ghostty was a sane mid-term for me: a good and modern terminal, with a simple config file, maintained by someone that I trust (Mitchell Hashimoto) and only that.
About Linux: I don't use Ghostty in Linux because I'm comfortable with Konsole.
There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.
I like Ghostty because I find it both fast and configurable, and it's multi-platform without treating macOS like the red headed step child. I also appreciate how its configuration is text-based, which I prefer to someone's opinion of how a configuration GUI should behave, and I think it's good the developers aren't wasting a second of their time thinking about a configuration GUI.
I also thought like that, but you only to set some defaults and you're ready to go. If you still prefer a GUI there are online generators. Nowdays you can also vibecode them, they are very simple and any LLM will do it right
There are mature emulators for decades now, why go backwards? I guess there are a few tiny features that might be useful, and am open to them. But a new project needs to be strictly better, not two steps forward, one step back.
Ghostty is getting there though, and today is a milestone, not complaining too loudly.
I have been using Alacritty for its GPU acceleration long ago. Ghostty was slightly faster, but then Ptyxis was also faster. Since I preferred to configure my terminal with GUI, I have switched to Ptyxis.
Yeah, I recently tried out Kitty and Ghostty just feels much smoother when rendering most TUIs and even some more basic stuff like the homebrew progress bar. It is also better about respecting platform conventions for things like keybinds and window/tab behavior.
I don't think Konsole is actually faster than Kitty or Alacritty. Kitty is really nice and an innovator in a lot of terminal standards. It's also non-commercial and not related to any sort of startup (not that Konsole is either). It's definitely my first choice of the bunch, followed by Alacritty.
I assume that this depends on your computer/GPU/GPU driver.
I have used Konsole for many years and I have used kitty for about 2 years in 2024/2025, then I have switched to ghostty around the beginning of 2026.
At least in my computers (with NVIDIA GPUs and Gentoo Linux), kitty was many times faster than Konsole and Ghostty even faster.
Moreover, in the now somewhat distant past when I was still using Konsole, it did not have some font rendering features that I desired, but that might have been solved meanwhile.
A reason why the terminal emulator speed is important for me is that I frequently compile big software projects and I find it unacceptable for a compilation to be slowed down by the low speed at which the compiler output is displayed on the terminal window, which happened frequently with all terminal emulators older than kitty and ghostty (I have always used CPUs with enough cores so that compilation itself is very fast, so the older terminal emulators become the bottleneck).
For me it's simply that iTerm2 got really fat over the years, and Ghostty was a nice and slim alternative - plus it has one of the better Kitty Graphics Protocol implementations which is fun to tinker with. e.g.: https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty (needs zig-0.17.0).
For me, the main reason to use Ghostty is simply that mouse support works right out of the box. In Konsole clicking a spot to move the cursor only works if you're using Bash. While it also works with the Fish Shell on Ghostty.
You could, but my answer would probably skew your opinion about as much as yours did mine. :D
To me the point of Konsole is that it works well, plus it's already there. Ghostty I need to make an effort to have it, however small it is, and I'm just trying to understand what I'd be missing if I didn't.
Konsole is not already there for me. I would have to make an effort to get Konsole, just like Ghostty. I’m struggling to see what point you are trying to make. Do you want someone to tell you Ghostty is better than Konsole to convince you to switch, or … not?
Kitty is really nice, a programmable terminal that does everything I want, GPU rendering, etc. Haven't used Ghostty yet but one of its advantages is libghostty, modern terminal emulation as a library.
> libghostty: a cross-platform, minimal dependency library that exposes a C API so feature-rich, correct, and fast terminal functionality can be embedded by any application anywhere.
Oh the author actually posted about it just now in rich detail. It's pretty exciting for people who spend much of their time in the terminal.
I don't know about the others as I used Terminal.app on mac since Panther, but Ghostty has been a pretty good upgrade, at first offering 24-bit colour which Terminal.app didn't have at the time of its release. I also like the shell integration such as easy selection of command output. I don't ask much from a terminal as evidenced by using Terminal.app for almost 2 decades, but Ghostty has not once been an issue and is 'invisible' to me.
for terminals I personally am using kitty, but libghostty is great and powers ghostel in emacs which is amazing. Also note if you start trying to look at unicode correctness, in my experience ghostty is in general the best among all alternatives.
> Konsole is way faster than any of those on my computer and it has all the usual suspects I'd expect from a modern terminal emulator.
Same boat here, though I also get to enjoy some of the benefits of libghostty, via ghostel in Emacs. Ghostel is noticeably faster when there's a lot of output being dumped, but I don't often need the speed and use it only because it's integrated rather well into the rest of my Emacs.
> tmux -CC integration
If you can stomach Emacs, there are at least two packages that implement this, one via eat and another via vterm, though none via ghostel just yet. Shouldn't be difficult to port, though.
Yeah. It's slow on Linux, for sure. I use Foot, which as far as I've tested is the fastest to launch. I use Niri and launch Foot terminals all the time as part of my workflow (it's just how my mind works), so time to launch matters to me.
I can use Ghostty and use the same featureful terminal on Linux and macOS.
I also hate configuring Konsole, most KDE apps for that matter. Being able to have a plaintext configuration file I can keep in my dotfiles is way simpler.
I don't know Konsole, but kitty have tons of features other "plain" terminals lack. It's not just about speed (which I never got the obsession about either)
The advertised point is it needs zero config to work outside of the box. For example nerd fonts are included by default whereas you need to install them if you are using let’s say iterm2.
I'm not sure why you want shaders, but if you use a coding agent in the terminal you definitely want image support. Otherwise it's very hard to see what the agent is seeing.
I'd love to, I switched back to iTerm after not really feeling any big difference in my uses cases, but also hating the crappy plain text with no defaults listed config that required me to use a goddamn web app to comfortably learn and fill out.
There was also some pretty noticeable differences in character rendering between the two with identical-as-I-could-make-them font settings.
> here was also some pretty noticeable differences in character rendering between the two with identical-as-I-could-make-them font settings.
I'm pretty sure it was iTerm's problem.
I've tested a number of Terminal Emulators on macOS and Ghostty's rendering is always superior.
Yeah, except the default config file doesn't EXIST and there is nothing but the reference docs to tell you what the hell you're supposed to put in there. What am I supposed to do, guess? Is it `font=` or `font-family` or `font-name`? That's fucking terrible. The very existence of a website like this: https://ghostty.zerebos.com proves the failure in my opinion.
Good tools should be invisible. Good tools behave the way I want them to. That's different than the way you want them to behave. Or appear. Good defaults are good. That is absolutely no excuse to abandon good UX for configurability.
I'm happy the defaults work for you. They don't for me.
And don't get me wrong, ghostty is a fine terminal and I don't begrudge it, and I think libghostty is awesome, it's just not the application for me.
Lots of things bother me about my terminal emulators, and it's almost always in the category of "things don't work right". It's never "I wish my terminal emulator ran faster." Ghostty seems hyper focused on speed, with the negative side effect that compatibility breaks - in practice. I get that it's following all the newest standards or whatever it's doing, but in reality it always needs custom setup to work right. And for me the net effect is that it's always creating problems, not solving them.
I was sceptical for decades as well.
But they are amazing - no more closing the xterm by mistake. I'm using those because I wanted for example a single window with THREE consoles open at once AND being able to handle some ANSI crazy theming.
Why should I use Ghostty over iTerm2? I don't care about fancy fonts, iTerm2 speed (for me) is plenty (just tested against 1.4 -- don't see noticeable difference on MBP M1) and I do like to tweak some options/settings (and was just mildly annoyed when hitting `cmd+,` opened my default text editor...
I'm also very reluctant to switch and will not switch anytime soon. I have small compact tabs which I color code dynamically with iTerm2 and also custom profiles with custom keyboard keys overrides by program and directory. So the "harness" around the terminal is more feature rich with iTerm2.
These kind of features are not available in Ghostty in this form.
And about backups in iTerm2: Just do an export and maybe also a backup of your profiles. So that works.
I also do not care about a "super fast" terminal... my iTerm2 is fast enough for 99% of use cases for me.
I don't think anyone is trying to convince you you should use Ghostty over iTerm2. It's a technically excellent terminal built with an incredibly rigorous and well thought out guiding philosophy and a remarkable amount of passion. Nobody cares if you want to run it or not.
For me even just the config format is such an upgrade that it was worth switching. Just a simple text file I can backup anywhere and actually read without clicking in a tabbed GUI where I never seem to remember what goes where. iTerm2 still has that weird thing you have to export right?
It’s subjective. The config format is a downgrade for me. The only settings I change is the color theme anyways. The terminal default should work well. It takes four seconds to use the mouse to open the theme config and pick a theme. It takes at least five minute to find the config file location, the syntax for the config file, understand whether it uses fs events to auto reload, and then decide to include or exclude it in your backups. I don’t intensely customize my terminal emulator so it’s not worthwhile. On the other hand my Emacs config is more than 500 lines long and that’s worthwhile.
Ghostty is so great. I am very thankful to Mitchell for dedicating so much of his time to making a terminal that is truly great. Finally, somebody really cares and has the technical abilities to materialize that care as great software.
Also, ghostel in Emacs is fantastic as well (of course in a big part thanks to libghostty) — most of my work has now shifted into Emacs as a result.
i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.
iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.
btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.
I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2
While I'm not a hard core terminal emulator expert or tweaker, it was a bit of a learning curve to get into Ghostty after iTerm2. I hope this latest release makes it easier to edit the splits, haven't tested yet.
But the biggest thing that made me stay on Ghostty was that there's a freaking config file. With iTerm you had to export the profile and keybindings, and then import them on a new system which was clumsy, and easy to forget. Now ghostty.config is just one of my dotfiles, with a clear understandable git history, I love it.
Yup I switched to WezTerm from iTerm2 and being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits (especially because WezTerm allows more complicated Lua scripts)
I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!
Do you have specific examples of usability issues?
My main issues with ghostty: the global shortcut for quick window suddenly stops working and works again only if I focus ghostty. (On a mac)
The other one is quick window goes out of the monitor if i have disconnected and connected the laptop from minitor.
Another: sometimes autocomplete suggestions are shown incorrectly in some weird location (like middle of the screen, not at the cursor), again occasionally.
I'm happy with ghostty now too, but until a couple months ago it didn't have search. Which made me uncertain how people use terminals without built-in search. It really surprised me that it apparently was so low on the must-haves list that it took over a year to have it. I think I search terminals multiple times a day when I'm operating production systems.
I loved Ghostty for thr first month I tried it, but got some strange behavior when SSHing into some machines. Sounds like this release may address that. Maybe I can finally ditch iTerm2, lol
It’s rude to install a terminfo on a remote machine (which you may not be the owner of). It’s a preposterous for a terminal emulator to install things on a remote machine just to make it work.
It's actually the remote machine that isn't working, but I get the frustration. What I did to fix this is to override the environment variables in your SSH config like this:
If you want to use in a terminal emulator features that do not exist in any xterm variant and the remote computer does know only xterm, there is no way to do that without installing data into the terminfo database.
Otherwise, there is no need to install anything, you should just set the environment variable TERM in the remote computer to one of the xterm variants and then modern terminal emulators like kitty or ghostty will still work fine, but of course only as long as you use the xterm-compatible subset of their features.
Yea unfortunately eg Ubuntu’s bashrc has a script which will make it drop colors regardless of the presence of ghostty’s terminfo. Its `screen` will also fail, so e.g. it will refuse to upgrade to a new distro release.
I'm still using Wezterm here due to its Windows support, and I like being able to share one configuration my company Windows and my personal Linux laptops.
I've come to like its hyperlink rules to automatically generated clickable links to Reviews/Issues/Requirements/Linter Errors/... so I haven't felt the need to switch yet to have this feature missing.
Judging from kitty benchmark, 1.4 is much faster than previous version 1.3.1. Vivido[0] was the fastest terminal when i measured terminal performance a month ago. Now Ghostty is the fastest. Time to catch up.
Are the context menus hardcoded? Ghosttty is the only app on my machine that uses those horrendous rounded context menus, and because I don't use a compositor, they also have a giant black band around them. None of the config file settings seemed relevant, but maybe I missed something?
window.zig: widget.addCssClass("no-border-radius") when no compositor is detected seems like it should be preventing this, but it's clearly not working.
My experience with terminals was like this - Alacritty -> Ghostty -> tty7. The last one implements exactly what I had in mind when I used Alacritty and Ghostty. Only it doesn't hype much (the author apparently doesn't strive for that much), maybe that's for the better.
I tried Ghostty for a few months, but found that it had the slowest launch time of all the terminals (NixOS) - we're talking seconds instead of tens of ms. Sadly, it looks like the launch improvements here are for macos.
I'm on Rio at the moment, pending a wezterm bugfix (but I might just stick to Rio). The launch is perceptually instant on all my machines, and it does support sixels and all that nonsense.
> Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators.
Not really and that isn't a good thing in the long run.
There should not be any more complexity in a terminal emulator that will just lead attackers to craft RCEs exploits to your terminal to steal your secrets on your computer just because "Its cool" and has hundreds of escape codes.
I've been a laggard in switching to Ghostty because I used WezTerm and wrote a plugin to customize it to my liking. I switched to Ghostty just because I got tired of nothing happening in the WezTerm land and wanted to try something different.
I have quite enjoyed using the kitty image protocol in interesting ways.
I made a Claude code skill telling it to put a little image in the corner of the console when it does a render to see how something looks. It was quite fun telling it to draw a chicken with 5 SVG D paths and watching it iterate in the terminal.
Kitty is so awesome. I'm writing (well, as much as anyone writes) a MUD that models a decent part of Tokyo at 30-60fps over SSH at reasonable resolution (that's the dream, at least). I'm shocked at how fast I can render a big complex 3d environment, in the terminal.
The update experience in Ghostty is great. I think it takes under 5 seconds from the moment you click accept update and until the new updated terminal is running.
Glad for an update. It’s unfortunately still missing table-stakes features for people who use primarily keyboard driven workflows. I guess I’ll stick with wezterm for another year.
My biggest gripe with Ghostty is that on Mac, window state restoration doesn't remember the previous contents of the terminal, only the working directory. I've been meaning to switch back to iTerm2 over this, but just been lazy. It can be difficult for me to remember what a tab was used for just based on the working directory.
Hmm I wss checking for updates last night actually. I really hope they dont start adding llm junk to ghostty. I really like it, but mitchel sounded like he got bit by the llm bug a few months back.
Its honestly perfect as it is, just nerd performance tweaks imo.
Truly odd to see this comment. For me, mitchellh defines the moderate position on agents in coding, I mean that seriously: not occupies it, defines it. I’ve raised this point in discussions and others get what I mean without explanation. He’s better known for a mitigation to LLM downsides (vouch) than for making conspicuous use of them, and insists on human-only prose in issues, PRs and ‘real’ documentation (which I firmly agree with btw).
He also has a blog post and some tweets about how they can find and fix difficult bugs, and otherwise are capable of solving hard problems now. Well, they can.
I'm sure mitchellh will check out this comment section at some point - any updates on the move away from Github? I don't really see anything that's changed, but maybe it's behind the scenes. I was pretty excited on your initial post about it but it's been a while.
An LLM may be fine to implement quickly an application that more or less works, but I have not seen any evidence that any of them is able to write well optimized code, whenever the application is not just a duplicate of something older.
Ghosstty and a few other newer terminal emulators are not only lightweight, but they also implement very fast GPU rendering, which is one of their important advantages.
So not only their set of features matters, but also the achieved performance.
Of course, one could use an LLM to write a very fast terminal emulator, but for that a competent programmer must be included in the feedback loop, which would require many iterations and running benchmarks and emulation conformity tests. It cannot be done by vibe coding with a prompt like "write a lightweight terminal emulator".
If I am not mistaken, this is like another iTerm-like app. These tools have access to the innards of your system, like a VPN tool with access to all your connections. How do you trust, or build trust with, tools like these? How do you know whether the actor (s) behind them have malicious intent? Do you always build from an open-source project yourself? Is it a solution or the solution?
These are Ghostty GUI release notes, but I want to take a moment to highlight the libghostty progress we've made since Ghostty 1.3.
As a reminder, libghostty is the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more. I always felt that a free, high qualty, lightweight, reusable terminal emulation core would benefit the developer world more than any single GUI application. And that is playing out!
It is and always was my true purpose with the Ghostty project (I said this in my first ever talk about Ghostty!). I've jokingly said many times that Ghostty GUI is just a glorified tech demo for libghostty. That's not fair though, because GUI is great and there are really talented people working on it.
Since I started the project, Ghostty has always gotten people saying "I don't understand why you'd start a terminal emulator today." Well, the answer is libghostty. It's truly unique and its enabling something special (imo!).
Highlights of libghostty since 6 months ago (none of the below was true 6 months ago):
- Libghostty has nearly 100% coverage of all of Ghostty's core (and you can compile with flags to remove any of these features for size/safety): https://libghostty.tip.ghostty.org/
- Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS), Windows (MSVC and GNU), Linux, FreeBSD, Android, WebAssembly, and freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).
- Libghostty has bindings in pretty much every popular programming language: C, Zig, Go, Swift, Python, Rust, .NET, etc.
- Libghostty's memory requirements have dramatically shrunk to enable the portability above. There's still work to do but a single empty terminal now takes 90% less memory. And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.
- Libghostty powers all JetBrains IDE terminals, over 12.5 million active users. https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/10/jetbrains-termin...
- Libghostty is the most popular core behind the wave of venture-backed "agentic" terminals and editors, such as Herdr, cmux, and many others.
- Libghostty is being discussed and has been verbally accepted to replace the terminal core in Neovim: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/39773 (work still to be done)
- Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): https://github.com/dakra/ghostel
- Libghostty's speed is used by Antithesis to fuzz popular terminal programs and has directly led to hundreds of bug fixes sent upstream to programs such as tmux, btop, shells, and other terminal emulators. :)
- And so much more: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty
Libghostty is really successfully turning into the tide that raises all boats. As it becomes more popular, Ghostty itself gets more performant and stable, and so does everyone else. It is also a vehicle for delivering modern terminal emulation to the widest source possible.
I plan on tagging libghostty 1.0 in the next few months and declaring ABI stability at that point!
Because of your multiple "I am tired of saying this, but this text was written by me and not an LLM" in your blog posts, I want to tell you that I read it word for word. :D I know this comment adds not much but I felt it needed to be said.
One almost forgets how easy it is to read a wall of text when it was written by a human. This was nice to read (also because you can feel it's got care behind it).
I'm from the KDE project, and have been working on a new frontend built on libghostty-vt to hopefully one day ease our maintenance burden.
It's been a quite smooth experience, and I remain very excited about the lib. I believe you are successfully setting the standard. Big congrats for your 1.4.0!
Ooooo, will this end up in Konsole / konsolepart? Or will it be a new app?
It'll be a new app, but it does provide a drop-in replacement for konsolepart (along with also having a QML module API for embeds into Qt Quick-based app, closing a gap Konsole currently leaves open). I'm sure it'll be some time before it would be ready to replace Konsole as default, also because conversations like that take some time and are a community process.
Thank you for your work on this. When I was working on neovim core and started dealing more and more with the edge cases of libvterm and terminal emulation in general, I had the same thought "we should just have a gold standard library for this." But that was 6/7 years ago (2019) and a lot of stuff happened in that interim unrelated to engineering that demotivated me from pursuing it.
Periodically, I would run into TUI issues and think "I should just finally do it," especially around wanting to replace tmux in general. But I knew from experience the long tail of annoying issues for terminals that it's more time consuming than it appears, and so I again never bothered.
Thanks for the good work to raise all boats :)
I tend to move away from terminal emulation towards GUI when I can (and using custom remote protocols somewhat inspired by arcan), but TUI is still useful for a while. I actually had a need for a good terminal emulation library for the fallback TUI/pty attachment for non-gui programs for my supervisor, so I'll try out libghostty.
Just wanted to say thank you for all your contributions to our industry, Mitchell. I love Ghostty and your vision here, and evangelize it whenever I can.
It's a pleasure reading your posts.
Thanks for the work on getting libghostty 1.4 out! :D
Wanted to add too that I can't wait for xterm to eventually support libghostty, you've been super supportive providing feedback!
https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/5686
That's xterm.js. Xterm is an entirely different piece of software.
As a fairly recent ghostty user I was surprised with how quickly it became my default terminal. Very smooth experience so far.
I know it’s been said elsewhere ITT, but thank you for making and supporting Ghostty!
Absolutely incredible. You've convinced our team to start getting to work in Zig and we're loving it!! Thanks for all you do
Maybe I’m just dreaming here but how far off is libghostty for Linux consoles?
Agreed on the value of libghostty. I switched from vterm to ghostel recently and it's solved some refresh issues I previously had with vterm when using CLI coding agents in emacs.
> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).
That's really cool, but I'm drawing a blank; what's it used for? Embedded terminal something?
Yep, fun little demo: https://x.com/UzaAft/status/2093774764598817022
Okay, that's fun:) ...so if I use this on an ESP* with a physical display and keyboard attached, at what point does it stop counting as a terminal emulator again?:)
> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).
I am really impressed. When I had read your original comment, I literally shouted oye! (meaning woah) because of how interesting it felt. Glad that I can see the demo as well.
But aside from the fun little demo, what are the real use cases that we can think of as well.
here are some that I have thought of
1. SSH'ing into a terminal (VPS) or being able to view what the AI agents are doing on that VPS and controlling them very thinly in your pocket.
2. I have a slight dream that I'd like to chip in but I always wanted to create something like monkeytype but on embedded-hardware. Something which can just plug to TV's and people can connect a keyboard and start to type.
3. Or another idea but being a book reader and having it connect to some library resource
(2) & (3) for the underdeveloped regions.
Maybe (1) can be good as well and could very well be a small computer terminal which can teach/help the underdeveloped regions.
I live in India and I see it first hand how genuinely just want to create some extremely minimalist software on extremely cheap hardware to make funding of them easier and more scalable.
This also makes the constraints work good as one of the govt's basically spent a lot of money providing mid/high end tablets to every children and it turned out to be quite catastrophic because although it was kiosked because it was just intended to watch videos or read resources.
Children paid people to crack it and then started using instagram on it. My mother is a govt. teacher and she strongly thinks that it was a waste of resources and even the parents of the children and local village meeting committees think so as well. I remember reading some local news articles about villages conducting meetings on how to prevent their children from such instagram addiction so quickly after the tabs were given.
I would like to hope that maybe someday someone creates the more optimal solution to the problems that I discussed and libghostty comes handy to the situation. Thanks for making it and have a nice day :-D
terminal emulation seems to keep playing a central role not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a replacement
I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it
Any plans for Ghostty to have the history of the terminal window reloaded on restart? Like the Mac native terminal app does? I am a heavy terminal user with a lot of tabs open, and after I restart the computer for whatever reason, I would like to have my terminal(s) as I left them.
Isn’t it written in Zig? Not sure how that is “highly portable” compared to C
From https://ziglang.org/intro/overview/
Aha, I wondered why the JetBrains terminals had become so much better recently. Didn't realize they'd made the switch.
Great stuff! If it wasn't for Rex I'd still be using Ghostty daily
Thank you for making Ghostty, it’s a pleasure to use it everyday for work :)
Is the launch timed for Halloween parties? Good job team + community!
But could it do two rows of tabs?
I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.
If I don't want to use the wave of "venture backed ghostty wrappers" for remote mobile coding similar to Claude Code remote, what options do I have? Any plans for a first party remote solution that's not SSH?
Hello Onavo. Cosyra.com is not venture backed and not a ghostty wrapper! Lets you remote control all your agents from your phone without SSH.
rootshell is libghostty and free, doesnt strike me as vc backed
the web version powers our quickstart via a cloudflare websocket and some custom patches (only on desktop): https://hotaisle.xyz/quick-start
it is all open source: https://github.com/hotaisle/hotaisle-website
Why is libghostty better than alacritty?
Although not necessarily advertised as such, I've been successfully using alacritty in several projects injecting terminals into things both serious and silly.
I wouldn’t say it’s better, because that’s very subjective, but it is more “feature complete”. Alacritty is very minimal and rejects community PRs for features often driven by their general ethos. libghostty supports a lot of features I don’t foresee making their way into Alacritty.
I use Alacritty and GNOME Terminal. I don’t have a great reason for not using or trying Ghostty other than I have a minor aversion to Zig. (Again, not a great reason and arguably a not good reason)
I've tried Ghostty and it's great, but Kitty's hints mode[1] is the one feature keeping me from switching from Kitty to Ghostty. There are quite a few discussions around this and similar features in the Ghosstty-org/ghostty Discussions[2] which I follow. Most of them are references from ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2394[3]. Maybe now that Ghostty has finished implementing Kitty graphics hints will be next .
[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/
[2]: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions
[3]: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2394
How have I not heard of hints mode before, that is amazing. Thanks for pointing it out I need to go remember some new hotkeys now.
Yeah this is what is keeping me from using ghostty. Unfortunately I think that discussion is dead and no one agrees on the design of the three or so separate parts. I maintain a fork with quick select for my own purposes but I can’t use it at work.
Oof, I've never heard of that and it sounds amazing
Hints Mode, yummy. That would be nice.
See like something that can be handled by the multiplexer?
I still don't understand the point of Ghostty, Kitty, Wezterm...
Konsole is way faster than any of those on my computer and it has all the usual suspects I'd expect from a modern terminal emulator.
The one feature I miss since moving to Linux and not having iTerm2 is tmux -CC integration. None of those offer it.
To be clear, I'm not attempting to be dismissive. I really want to understand what it is that they bring.
KDE guy here.
Konsole is a fantastic and very mature terminal emulator, but it does have some real gaps that reveal its age.
The Qt toolkit that most KDE software is based on at some point introduced a next-gen toolkit-within-a-toolkit called Qt Quick, which most of our newer apps are written in. However, in its library form Konsole can only be embedded into apps that use the old gen toolkit. This is a real impediment to some efforts.
The old gen toolkit also typically doesn't use Vulkan or OpenGL for rendering, and so Konsole's terminal renderer doesn't either. Konsole's real-world performance during use is arguably just fine, but it does leave a lot of performance and battery life on the table.
libghostty also has somewhat wider support for newer stuff like Kitty protocols, even though Konsole certainly trumps it in support for older stuff (like sixels).
There's some other shortcomings to Konsole that are not inherent to the technology, like accessibility support not quite being where it should be.
And while the default UI is, in most distros, OK, there sure is a lot of spiderwebs and spacebar heating lurking in the settings dialogs (of which there are strangely many). It's also a bit dated vs. our HIG at the moment.
Which is to say, these projects can and do have a point, especially if they provide a nice library instead of hoarding all the good to themselves.
A couple of annoyances I've had shipping CLI apps to Konsole users:
1. By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support. Users can enable it manually, but you need to ship fallbacks by default since otherwise the default users will have a broken experience. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc all ship working OSC8 support out of the box.
2. No built-in Nerd Font support, so if you want to render icons, you need to tell your users to set up a patched font or else have fallbacks. Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.
That being said Konsole is much better than most emulators. iTerm2 is not bad, although it lacks Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support (which all of the above have, including Konsole, and which is very useful for drawing prettier terminal UIs). The worst by far is Apple Terminal, truly the IE6 of terminal emulators.
What's so bad about Apple Terminal? I've tried iTerm2 and others but never found a compelling reason to use them over the stock app. I don't live in the terminal like some do, though.
Apple Terminal doesn't support:
1. The Kitty keyboard protocol, which makes it impossible to distinguish e.g. Shift-Enter from Enter
2. OSC8 hyperlinks
3. It breaks on APC queries, so you need special handling to not emit them
4. Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support
5. The Kitty Terminal Graphics Protocol (or sixel)
6. OSC 9 notifications (or any of the later versions)
and a bunch of other stuff, this is just off the top of my head. For a long time they didn't even support 24-bit color, although they fixed that in Tahoe.
It's totally fine for basic UNIX tooling, but pretty painful if you're trying to make nice interactive TUIs.
> By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support.
That is, in my opinion, the correct default.
I believe that the default behavior should be to never open a link without a confirmation from the user that this may be done.
This should be enough to avoid malicious links. I do not believe that completely disabling links is a good default, because they are very frequently useful when you read some text file in the terminal window.
Yes, I agree. Ghostty et al don't open-on-click, but on hover they'll show you the URL and there's a keyboard shortcut + click to open. This is much better UX than disabling OSC8.
Yeah, because more complexity where you don't expect it doesn't cost anything?
Up until 5 hours ago this fix was not present:
> The displayed target is sanitized so invisible and line-breaking characters cannot conceal the effective destination.
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...
The sensible default is to have it turned off. And by the looks of it Ghostty versions before this you couldn't even turn it off.
"One implementation of a feature had a bug, therefore this feature should be turned off on all implementations by default" is probably not going to convince people who think the feature is good.
If you don't want to be able to have clickable hyperlinks, by all means use Konsole — no one is forcing you to use Ghostty. But if you want to know why people like Ghostty's approach vs Konsole's, it's because Ghostty pushes terminal emulator features forward and is low latency. Konsole is low latency and adopts some but not all features that other people invent. It's a noticeable difference and so people who like the feature part of the former like Ghostty/WezTerm/Kitty more than Konsole. If you don't care or dislike that part, and want a more conservative terminal (that is also low latency), Konsole and many others further on the conservative spectrum exist.
1) Personal preferences: different terminals come with different defaults, some people do not want to tinker with the settings, so they just stick with whatever immediately clicks.
2) Technical curiosity: some people probably started their own terminal project just for the fuck of having made their own - and they eventually gained a userbase.
3) Feature set: Most terminals implement most features these days, but at the time these projects started, you'd have a feature matrix between features and terminals because most terminals lacked some features; so people would pick whatever suited their needs.
Personally I've been using kitty for years mostly due to 3), at the time I chose my forever terminal, I evaluated like 12 different ones, and kitty was the only one that covered most of my needs without feeling like it suffers from random quirks, and I like that it has built-in terminal multiplexer (a'la tmux) and emoji picker.
The terminal ecosystem needs to change, and these terminals support a lot of cool features. Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth, Kitty graphics, Wezterm and its mux domains & lua config, lots of cool ideas there.
Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that
> Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth
Can you please explain what this means? I have Ghostty installed just as a backup to use when I have terminal saturation in my default (MacOS Terminal). But other than being super responsive, I don’t know why people love it so. Perhaps I’m missing something large and compelling.
I assume the quote is referring to libghostty. In which case a lot of different tools like vs code, Emacs, Gvim, Intellij and other IDEs, even web consoles on stuff like Azure essentially use and reimplement the same core, the idea behind libghostty is to replace those with a common component where long term development can better support the needs of all terminals.
In terms of ghostty itself its just a highly competent use of libghostty, Mitchell’s message above about it being a tech demo is tongue and cheek, but its not far off from the truth. It is just a really solid no bells and whistles, bar excellent execution, terminal emulator that uses libghostty.
Terminal state machine parsing is a very tricky thing, especially when you have people defining arbitrary protocols to interact with it. So having one implementation simplifies the development a lot. Of course this buys you into their ecosystem and whatever ghostty specifically supports etc.
A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one
It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.
When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.
So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.
Really? Claude Code is buggy but not very demanding in terms of rendering -- are you sure the perf issues were local?
I might not be using the correct terms. But, here is what I was seeing:
- in a running session text display would slow down intermittently. Like 2-3 words a second
- occasionally terminal would stop, some times in the middle of showing a response, and would need to restart the terminal to get it back. But I tailed the session logs and Claude code didn’t think anything was amiss. It was proceeding like normal
After switching to Ghostty these issues went away and has been rock solid since then.
EDIT: formatting
For me: it doesn't really "bring" anything more than what I expect from a terminal.
In Mac, we had the default terminal app which has some problems with TUI apps and other small issues. iTerm2 is the replacement that most users use, but it become too bloated with useless features and AI, while it was hard to keep a good config file that I could share between devices. Ghostty was a sane mid-term for me: a good and modern terminal, with a simple config file, maintained by someone that I trust (Mitchell Hashimoto) and only that.
About Linux: I don't use Ghostty in Linux because I'm comfortable with Konsole.
There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.
I like Ghostty because I find it both fast and configurable, and it's multi-platform without treating macOS like the red headed step child. I also appreciate how its configuration is text-based, which I prefer to someone's opinion of how a configuration GUI should behave, and I think it's good the developers aren't wasting a second of their time thinking about a configuration GUI.
Funny, I won’t use a term emulator unless it has a good GUI config. Even SGI and Windows Command prompt had them in the 90s.
Also the konsole context menu and default toolbar are a mess.
I also thought like that, but you only to set some defaults and you're ready to go. If you still prefer a GUI there are online generators. Nowdays you can also vibecode them, they are very simple and any LLM will do it right
There are mature emulators for decades now, why go backwards? I guess there are a few tiny features that might be useful, and am open to them. But a new project needs to be strictly better, not two steps forward, one step back.
Ghostty is getting there though, and today is a milestone, not complaining too loudly.
I know for many folks they like the fact that it is cross platform (works on mac/linux) etc and gpu acceleration which is really nice to have.
I have been using Alacritty for its GPU acceleration long ago. Ghostty was slightly faster, but then Ptyxis was also faster. Since I preferred to configure my terminal with GUI, I have switched to Ptyxis.
Yeah, I recently tried out Kitty and Ghostty just feels much smoother when rendering most TUIs and even some more basic stuff like the homebrew progress bar. It is also better about respecting platform conventions for things like keybinds and window/tab behavior.
I don't think Konsole is actually faster than Kitty or Alacritty. Kitty is really nice and an innovator in a lot of terminal standards. It's also non-commercial and not related to any sort of startup (not that Konsole is either). It's definitely my first choice of the bunch, followed by Alacritty.
I use Linux at home and Mac at work. I use Ghostty simply to have the same terminal on both systems.
Me too. I was using WezTerm for a while for the same reason.
It wasn’t the only reason I switched, but I prefer config to be config and code to be code rather than my WezTerm config to be executable.
I assume that this depends on your computer/GPU/GPU driver.
I have used Konsole for many years and I have used kitty for about 2 years in 2024/2025, then I have switched to ghostty around the beginning of 2026.
At least in my computers (with NVIDIA GPUs and Gentoo Linux), kitty was many times faster than Konsole and Ghostty even faster.
Moreover, in the now somewhat distant past when I was still using Konsole, it did not have some font rendering features that I desired, but that might have been solved meanwhile.
A reason why the terminal emulator speed is important for me is that I frequently compile big software projects and I find it unacceptable for a compilation to be slowed down by the low speed at which the compiler output is displayed on the terminal window, which happened frequently with all terminal emulators older than kitty and ghostty (I have always used CPUs with enough cores so that compilation itself is very fast, so the older terminal emulators become the bottleneck).
For me it's simply that iTerm2 got really fat over the years, and Ghostty was a nice and slim alternative - plus it has one of the better Kitty Graphics Protocol implementations which is fun to tinker with. e.g.: https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty (needs zig-0.17.0).
> chipz-kitty: Emulators in terminal experiment.
Cool! How fun, I'm a big fan of your work and will enjoy learning from this project too. (:
For me, the main reason to use Ghostty is simply that mouse support works right out of the box. In Konsole clicking a spot to move the cursor only works if you're using Bash. While it also works with the Fish Shell on Ghostty.
It works well, that’s my only requirement. I could ask you the same, what’s the point of Konsole, what value does it bring?
You could, but my answer would probably skew your opinion about as much as yours did mine. :D
To me the point of Konsole is that it works well, plus it's already there. Ghostty I need to make an effort to have it, however small it is, and I'm just trying to understand what I'd be missing if I didn't.
Cross-platform native GUI, built-in nerd font symbols. Simple text file configuration with trivially easy platform/machine-specific drop-ins.
Konsole is not already there for me. I would have to make an effort to get Konsole, just like Ghostty. I’m struggling to see what point you are trying to make. Do you want someone to tell you Ghostty is better than Konsole to convince you to switch, or … not?
Seems a bit of a disingenuous comment when you initially said "I still don't understand the point...".
Surely you understand Konsole is not already there for most people?
Kitty is really nice, a programmable terminal that does everything I want, GPU rendering, etc. Haven't used Ghostty yet but one of its advantages is libghostty, modern terminal emulation as a library.
> libghostty: a cross-platform, minimal dependency library that exposes a C API so feature-rich, correct, and fast terminal functionality can be embedded by any application anywhere.
Oh the author actually posted about it just now in rich detail. It's pretty exciting for people who spend much of their time in the terminal.
I don't know about the others as I used Terminal.app on mac since Panther, but Ghostty has been a pretty good upgrade, at first offering 24-bit colour which Terminal.app didn't have at the time of its release. I also like the shell integration such as easy selection of command output. I don't ask much from a terminal as evidenced by using Terminal.app for almost 2 decades, but Ghostty has not once been an issue and is 'invisible' to me.
for terminals I personally am using kitty, but libghostty is great and powers ghostel in emacs which is amazing. Also note if you start trying to look at unicode correctness, in my experience ghostty is in general the best among all alternatives.
> Konsole is way faster than any of those on my computer and it has all the usual suspects I'd expect from a modern terminal emulator.
Same boat here, though I also get to enjoy some of the benefits of libghostty, via ghostel in Emacs. Ghostel is noticeably faster when there's a lot of output being dumped, but I don't often need the speed and use it only because it's integrated rather well into the rest of my Emacs.
> tmux -CC integration
If you can stomach Emacs, there are at least two packages that implement this, one via eat and another via vterm, though none via ghostel just yet. Shouldn't be difficult to port, though.
The other day I was able to click on Ghostty, then open Gnome Terminal, type a command and run it before Ghostty had finished loading.
Yeah. It's slow on Linux, for sure. I use Foot, which as far as I've tested is the fastest to launch. I use Niri and launch Foot terminals all the time as part of my workflow (it's just how my mind works), so time to launch matters to me.
Monstar is a libghostty derivative that resembles foot: https://github.com/rockorager/monstar
Namely it is wayland only, cpu rendered, and doesn't have any window decorations
I can use Ghostty and use the same featureful terminal on Linux and macOS.
I also hate configuring Konsole, most KDE apps for that matter. Being able to have a plaintext configuration file I can keep in my dotfiles is way simpler.
I don't know Konsole, but kitty have tons of features other "plain" terminals lack. It's not just about speed (which I never got the obsession about either)
The advertised point is it needs zero config to work outside of the box. For example nerd fonts are included by default whereas you need to install them if you are using let’s say iterm2.
The point for me is each one can have ten or so claudes, so any one crashing doesn't take down all the claudes ... and I don't have to learn tmux.
Can konsole do the fancy shader and inline images? I think that's all that distinguishes the others but I may be overlooking things.
I have no idea what that is or why I would want it.
I'm not sure why you want shaders, but if you use a coding agent in the terminal you definitely want image support. Otherwise it's very hard to see what the agent is seeing.
vouch this comment since this is a pretty common question people have, I don't believe it should be dead.
I do believe it should be dead
Ghostty is so much better than iTerm2! Don't get me started...
I'd love to, I switched back to iTerm after not really feeling any big difference in my uses cases, but also hating the crappy plain text with no defaults listed config that required me to use a goddamn web app to comfortably learn and fill out.
There was also some pretty noticeable differences in character rendering between the two with identical-as-I-could-make-them font settings.
> here was also some pretty noticeable differences in character rendering between the two with identical-as-I-could-make-them font settings. I'm pretty sure it was iTerm's problem.
I've tested a number of Terminal Emulators on macOS and Ghostty's rendering is always superior.
You should give 1.4 a try.
It just works. — Steve Jobs
Ref: https://arne.me/blog/we-need-more-zero-config-tools
Yeah except when it doesn't. I shouldn't need to reference documentation to change my terminal font.
Honestly, iTerm's settings were always a mess in my opinion.
I feel like good tools should be invisible and Ghostty's lack of fully fledged Settings app is a feature, not a bug.
Just open it in Kakoune/NeoVim and change with a speed of thoughts. Never used any third-party Settings apps though.
Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858121
Change with a speed of thought
Yeah, except the default config file doesn't EXIST and there is nothing but the reference docs to tell you what the hell you're supposed to put in there. What am I supposed to do, guess? Is it `font=` or `font-family` or `font-name`? That's fucking terrible. The very existence of a website like this: https://ghostty.zerebos.com proves the failure in my opinion.
Good tools should be invisible. Good tools behave the way I want them to. That's different than the way you want them to behave. Or appear. Good defaults are good. That is absolutely no excuse to abandon good UX for configurability.
I'm happy the defaults work for you. They don't for me.
And don't get me wrong, ghostty is a fine terminal and I don't begrudge it, and I think libghostty is awesome, it's just not the application for me.
Konsole is not gpu accelerated and is several orders of magnitude slower as a result than those that you listed?
The acceleration is the primary point.
Lots of things bother me about my terminal emulators, and it's almost always in the category of "things don't work right". It's never "I wish my terminal emulator ran faster." Ghostty seems hyper focused on speed, with the negative side effect that compatibility breaks - in practice. I get that it's following all the newest standards or whatever it's doing, but in reality it always needs custom setup to work right. And for me the net effect is that it's always creating problems, not solving them.
I was sceptical for decades as well. But they are amazing - no more closing the xterm by mistake. I'm using those because I wanted for example a single window with THREE consoles open at once AND being able to handle some ANSI crazy theming.
Xterm failed me :( Tabby just works.
cute little mascots
Why should I use Ghostty over iTerm2? I don't care about fancy fonts, iTerm2 speed (for me) is plenty (just tested against 1.4 -- don't see noticeable difference on MBP M1) and I do like to tweak some options/settings (and was just mildly annoyed when hitting `cmd+,` opened my default text editor...
I'm also very reluctant to switch and will not switch anytime soon. I have small compact tabs which I color code dynamically with iTerm2 and also custom profiles with custom keyboard keys overrides by program and directory. So the "harness" around the terminal is more feature rich with iTerm2.
These kind of features are not available in Ghostty in this form.
And about backups in iTerm2: Just do an export and maybe also a backup of your profiles. So that works.
I also do not care about a "super fast" terminal... my iTerm2 is fast enough for 99% of use cases for me.
One reason is portability if you use (or plan to use) desktop Linux
I don't think anyone is trying to convince you you should use Ghostty over iTerm2. It's a technically excellent terminal built with an incredibly rigorous and well thought out guiding philosophy and a remarkable amount of passion. Nobody cares if you want to run it or not.
For me even just the config format is such an upgrade that it was worth switching. Just a simple text file I can backup anywhere and actually read without clicking in a tabbed GUI where I never seem to remember what goes where. iTerm2 still has that weird thing you have to export right?
It’s subjective. The config format is a downgrade for me. The only settings I change is the color theme anyways. The terminal default should work well. It takes four seconds to use the mouse to open the theme config and pick a theme. It takes at least five minute to find the config file location, the syntax for the config file, understand whether it uses fs events to auto reload, and then decide to include or exclude it in your backups. I don’t intensely customize my terminal emulator so it’s not worthwhile. On the other hand my Emacs config is more than 500 lines long and that’s worthwhile.
Man, still does not fix the one bug I care about: being able to quickly `⌘+F, ⌘+V` - the find textbox does not respect keyboard shortcuts: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/11159
I was really hoping a fix for this would be included in this release.
Ghostty is so great. I am very thankful to Mitchell for dedicating so much of his time to making a terminal that is truly great. Finally, somebody really cares and has the technical abilities to materialize that care as great software.
Also, ghostel in Emacs is fantastic as well (of course in a big part thanks to libghostty) — most of my work has now shifted into Emacs as a result.
i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.
iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.
btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.
I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2
While I'm not a hard core terminal emulator expert or tweaker, it was a bit of a learning curve to get into Ghostty after iTerm2. I hope this latest release makes it easier to edit the splits, haven't tested yet.
But the biggest thing that made me stay on Ghostty was that there's a freaking config file. With iTerm you had to export the profile and keybindings, and then import them on a new system which was clumsy, and easy to forget. Now ghostty.config is just one of my dotfiles, with a clear understandable git history, I love it.
Yup I switched to WezTerm from iTerm2 and being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits (especially because WezTerm allows more complicated Lua scripts)
Why put up with quirks when you have something that works for you? How much faster ghostty is in practical terms?
I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!
Do you have specific examples of usability issues?
My main issues with ghostty: the global shortcut for quick window suddenly stops working and works again only if I focus ghostty. (On a mac)
The other one is quick window goes out of the monitor if i have disconnected and connected the laptop from minitor.
Another: sometimes autocomplete suggestions are shown incorrectly in some weird location (like middle of the screen, not at the cursor), again occasionally.
I'm happy with ghostty now too, but until a couple months ago it didn't have search. Which made me uncertain how people use terminals without built-in search. It really surprised me that it apparently was so low on the must-haves list that it took over a year to have it. I think I search terminals multiple times a day when I'm operating production systems.
I loved Ghostty for thr first month I tried it, but got some strange behavior when SSHing into some machines. Sounds like this release may address that. Maybe I can finally ditch iTerm2, lol
Very likely due to ghostty setting TERM to xterm-ghostty and your destination not recognizing it. Quick temp fix is using the wrapper (ghostty +ssh), see <https://ghostty.org/docs/features/ssh>. More permanently, copy terminfo to the remote machine, see <https://ghostty.org/docs/features/ssh>.
It’s rude to install a terminfo on a remote machine (which you may not be the owner of). It’s a preposterous for a terminal emulator to install things on a remote machine just to make it work.
It's actually the remote machine that isn't working, but I get the frustration. What I did to fix this is to override the environment variables in your SSH config like this:
Host * SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color
If you want to use in a terminal emulator features that do not exist in any xterm variant and the remote computer does know only xterm, there is no way to do that without installing data into the terminfo database.
Otherwise, there is no need to install anything, you should just set the environment variable TERM in the remote computer to one of the xterm variants and then modern terminal emulators like kitty or ghostty will still work fine, but of course only as long as you use the xterm-compatible subset of their features.
Yea unfortunately eg Ubuntu’s bashrc has a script which will make it drop colors regardless of the presence of ghostty’s terminfo. Its `screen` will also fail, so e.g. it will refuse to upgrade to a new distro release.
Lots of jank due to this custom terminfo.
You can also just add this to your SSH config to get the typical functionality working:
Is there a plan to have pre compiled binary on Linux? Having to download a zig compiler is a bit annoying...
I miss Ghostty when I am on my Windows machine. Really wish it was available on Windows.
I'm still using Wezterm here due to its Windows support, and I like being able to share one configuration my company Windows and my personal Linux laptops.
I've come to like its hyperlink rules to automatically generated clickable links to Reviews/Issues/Requirements/Linter Errors/... so I haven't felt the need to switch yet to have this feature missing.
I'm eying Kitty though.
Judging from kitty benchmark, 1.4 is much faster than previous version 1.3.1. Vivido[0] was the fastest terminal when i measured terminal performance a month ago. Now Ghostty is the fastest. Time to catch up.
[0] https://github.com/vivido-dev/vivido
Are the context menus hardcoded? Ghosttty is the only app on my machine that uses those horrendous rounded context menus, and because I don't use a compositor, they also have a giant black band around them. None of the config file settings seemed relevant, but maybe I missed something?
window.zig: widget.addCssClass("no-border-radius") when no compositor is detected seems like it should be preventing this, but it's clearly not working.
My experience with terminals was like this - Alacritty -> Ghostty -> tty7. The last one implements exactly what I had in mind when I used Alacritty and Ghostty. Only it doesn't hype much (the author apparently doesn't strive for that much), maybe that's for the better.
Oohh. I hadn't heard of tty7. I like its goal.
Unfortunately, it seems to be doing something strange - I use vi-mode with nushell and it renders every character I press - even in normal mode.
I might keep an eye on it - hopefully they improve whatever they're doing with local echo.
I should say - I currently use WezTerm for exactly the feature tty7 advertises about session support. Even remote sessions.
Really enjoy using ghostty but I've switched mostly back to konsole for only one reason: memory usage. I'll reevaluate, after reading this!
I tried Ghostty for a few months, but found that it had the slowest launch time of all the terminals (NixOS) - we're talking seconds instead of tens of ms. Sadly, it looks like the launch improvements here are for macos.
What did you settle on?
I like foot but don't mind waiting a few tens of ms in exchange for kitty's graphics.
I'm on Rio at the moment, pending a wezterm bugfix (but I might just stick to Rio). The launch is perceptually instant on all my machines, and it does support sixels and all that nonsense.
I've put libghostty in my bespoke IDEs and it's fantastic, thanks so much for all your hard work and vision.
> Building Ghostty from source is not recommended for most users.
Why is that? It reminds me of the XFree86 times when building from source was some unstable, fancy thing that was severely frowned upon.
Probably something to do with Zig. Zig changes so quickly that if you're not using exactly the compiler that they are using, it's unlikely to work.
That seems…fragile. Is there even much future in Zig? The only other major project that I know of using Zig ditched it.
Here's a delicious meal we prepared for you. We don't recommend you going to the kitchen and trying to prepare it all over again.
..but you can!
Nothing controversial here.
Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators. What a wonderful time to be alive, but very suspicious also :D
> Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators.
Not really and that isn't a good thing in the long run.
There should not be any more complexity in a terminal emulator that will just lead attackers to craft RCEs exploits to your terminal to steal your secrets on your computer just because "Its cool" and has hundreds of escape codes.
Great to see regular updates, this is probably the first package I install on any Linux distro.
Fast and clean. I find myself using Linux when I want to focus and study.
Windows is for music creation and certain games.
At this point, I'm really looking forward to Rex.
I've been a laggard in switching to Ghostty because I used WezTerm and wrote a plugin to customize it to my liking. I switched to Ghostty just because I got tired of nothing happening in the WezTerm land and wanted to try something different.
Rex will allow me to use my old workflow again.
I have quite enjoyed using the kitty image protocol in interesting ways.
I made a Claude code skill telling it to put a little image in the corner of the console when it does a render to see how something looks. It was quite fun telling it to draw a chicken with 5 SVG D paths and watching it iterate in the terminal.
Kitty is so awesome. I'm writing (well, as much as anyone writes) a MUD that models a decent part of Tokyo at 30-60fps over SSH at reasonable resolution (that's the dream, at least). I'm shocked at how fast I can render a big complex 3d environment, in the terminal.
Any source/screenshots?
The update experience in Ghostty is great. I think it takes under 5 seconds from the moment you click accept update and until the new updated terminal is running.
Love Ghostty!
Glad for an update. It’s unfortunately still missing table-stakes features for people who use primarily keyboard driven workflows. I guess I’ll stick with wezterm for another year.
Libghostty is a masterpiece dude. So easy to embed, nice bindings, and it's so fast.
I tried Ghostty, but went to Kitty in the end.
Im the only one no longer uses terminals apps, not even IDE's, now not even terminals.
Claude/Codex app all the way baby. What a crazy world.
Been a convert for a while it's so snappy
Very excited for this feature
My biggest gripe with Ghostty is that on Mac, window state restoration doesn't remember the previous contents of the terminal, only the working directory. I've been meaning to switch back to iTerm2 over this, but just been lazy. It can be difficult for me to remember what a tab was used for just based on the working directory.
I have replaced Ghostty with Rex from Superlogical, it's great and I really like the iOS app too.
Hmm I wss checking for updates last night actually. I really hope they dont start adding llm junk to ghostty. I really like it, but mitchel sounded like he got bit by the llm bug a few months back.
Its honestly perfect as it is, just nerd performance tweaks imo.
Truly odd to see this comment. For me, mitchellh defines the moderate position on agents in coding, I mean that seriously: not occupies it, defines it. I’ve raised this point in discussions and others get what I mean without explanation. He’s better known for a mitigation to LLM downsides (vouch) than for making conspicuous use of them, and insists on human-only prose in issues, PRs and ‘real’ documentation (which I firmly agree with btw).
He also has a blog post and some tweets about how they can find and fix difficult bugs, and otherwise are capable of solving hard problems now. Well, they can.
Is that the LLM bug to you?
https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
Because this company, and the superlogical idea intially emphasized building the terminal multiplexer for the agentic age.
I'm sure mitchellh will check out this comment section at some point - any updates on the move away from Github? I don't really see anything that's changed, but maybe it's behind the scenes. I was pretty excited on your initial post about it but it's been a while.
Sure enough, one minute later he posted a comment lol
Now if I could only upgrade it without powering down my current Ghostty
tmux, baby!
Or Rex ;)
damn, i don’t check this stuff for a month and boom now i must try Rex!
i signed up for the mailing list, do you just wait a bit?
happy to hear your thoughts while i wiggle in excitement!
Wrote a VT parser once, bracketed paste edge cases ate a whole week. Respect.
I think if you had Claude Fable build a lightweight terminal like Ghostty, you'd get a good one.
I doubt that very much.
An LLM may be fine to implement quickly an application that more or less works, but I have not seen any evidence that any of them is able to write well optimized code, whenever the application is not just a duplicate of something older.
Ghosstty and a few other newer terminal emulators are not only lightweight, but they also implement very fast GPU rendering, which is one of their important advantages.
So not only their set of features matters, but also the achieved performance.
Of course, one could use an LLM to write a very fast terminal emulator, but for that a competent programmer must be included in the feedback loop, which would require many iterations and running benchmarks and emulation conformity tests. It cannot be done by vibe coding with a prompt like "write a lightweight terminal emulator".
Here's one such project: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/frankenterm
However, it is more focused on multiplexing.
If I am not mistaken, this is like another iTerm-like app. These tools have access to the innards of your system, like a VPN tool with access to all your connections. How do you trust, or build trust with, tools like these? How do you know whether the actor (s) behind them have malicious intent? Do you always build from an open-source project yourself? Is it a solution or the solution?