Ghostty in review: how's the new terminal emulator?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I was misremembering. There is scrollback, but you can't search it. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
Is it crazy that I just use the default provided terminal emulator (Fedora/Gnome)? Why would I use something like this?
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!
If you like the default terminal use it for me i use terminals like this due to the gpu acceleration and stuff
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.
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-256color
Yep - 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.
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.
I tried it out on Fedora a few months ago and I found alacritty felt faster in nvim. So i stayed on alacritty.
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.
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.
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 +options style. 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 don't know how they picked the name for this new terminal, maybe it's a reference.
I use this Terminal emulator on a daily basis main reason due to GPU acceleration while having tabbing
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.
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.
