alt Hacker NewsGhostty – Terminal Emulator
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Recently tried multiple terminals because I am gradually migrating off of Macs and I liked Ghostty but the lack of searching the scrollback has turned me away from it. Opening another editor to do the same I tried but didn't like.
WezTerm has everything I need and is closest to iTerm2, minus being able to quit it and have it restore all windows and tabs on restart -- but oh well, it's not an important enough feature. It also renders my prompt perfectly; no small pixel divergences like all other terminals have.
Kitty I don't remember why I rejected.
Alacritty I like but the lack of tabs is not acceptable for the moment... and before you ask: I hate tmux. So much more key presses to achieve basic functionality, it boggles my mind why people love it. But, to each their own obviously.
It's also likely I'll settle for some Linux-exclusive terminal but as I'm not yet possessing a Linux workstation (just a laptop) I haven't put the requisite time to do this research.
Suggestions are welcome.
I've only ever stuck with urxvt and more recently foot since moving to Wayland. On Mac the default terminal works for me, though I've been using Ghostty to follow a trend, but I seriously don't understand the benefits netted to me? (other than the cool icon)
I love Ghostty, especially the UI is so much nicer than Kitty. However, for some reason ghostty sometimes has severe issues with dealing with SSH connections. The terminal is like broken and wrongly displayed and you can't properly type something. Therefore, I still use Kitty, especially for SSH connections. I don't know what `kitten ssh` does, but it makes my terminal work with SSH.
When Ghostty was publicly announced, I used it for a few months and gave up on it due to the lack of support for the CMD+F feature that I use Terminal.app. This is a critical feature for me while tailing logs on my local. I tried the workaround of capturing the text into a text file and then searching it. It just didn't work for my workflow and dropped it. Ghostty is great otherwise. But, without the CMD+F, it's of no use to me.
These look like the major past threads (in reverse order) - have I missed any?
AI Usage Policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 - Jan 2026 (273 comments)
Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568794 - Jan 2026 (138 comments)
Why users cannot create Issues directly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 - Jan 2026 (310 comments)
Ghostty is now non-profit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46138238 - Dec 2025 (289 comments)
Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110842 - Dec 2025 (115 comments)
Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434 - Oct 2025 (147 comments)
Ghostty 1.2.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252026 - Sept 2025 (26 comments)
AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568 - Aug 2025 (464 comments)
We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905808 - Aug 2025 (224 comments)
Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884930 - Jan 2025 (79 comments)
Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562743 - Dec 2024 (55 comments)
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42527355 - Dec 2024 (7 comments)
Ghostty 1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447 - Dec 2024 (681 comments)
Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41914025 - Oct 2024 (32 comments)
I like the look of this terminal, but it doesn't work correctly with SSH (top, ncdu for example) unless you hack the $TERM variable. It feels a bit vibecoded even though it isn't.
To give a little productive criticism, one thing I really miss is when having tiled terminals, I want to be able to full screen one of them temporarily. Double click in iterm allows this, so does mod+f in i3wm. It really is the only thing stopping me from switching to this (and I admit it might be buried somewhere in the settings)
The fetishization of tools is one of the things that mark a dilettante mindset.
You see it on all hobbies, e.g. when the someone sees a photograph and their first question is about what camera and optics were used. No question about composition, light, the moment, creativity... they only care for the tools.
The technique and knowledge is the important thing, not the tools. They forget the good practitioner can do a great photo with a $200 phone than they with the best Canon DSLR.
I have seen this in all hobbies I have practiced, be it musical instruments, kolinsky brushes on miniature painting, montain bikers, running apparell...
As I'm getting older I care less about editors, terminals, Linux distros... and after seeing what can be done with agentic coding tools less so.
My only issue with ghostty is it isn’t immediately recognized by some programs through ssh (eg less) and they don’t operate properly. However there’s a one liner that solves the problem permanently on the remote machine[0] so it isn’t too bad. Hopefully in the near future ghostty’s terminfo will be shipped with common linux distros.
For anyone using this terminal that hates != (and others) being turned into a single character, I have the following to turn off ligatures:
font-feature = -dlig
font-feature = -liga
font-feature = -calt
Funny, I was just configuring ghostty. I finally made the jump in order to get rid of tmux as a layer of indirection.
Here's what I landed on: This config tries to emulate as much of tmux with native ghostty features (splits and tabs).
https://codeberg.org/jfkimmes/dotfiles/src/branch/master/gho...
Loving how well Ghostty works and looks. When running several Projects I need quite a few tabs as all these AI agents take sometime to complete. Overhead tabs get real messy very quickly. Multiple windows become a nightmare quickly. Side bar tabs have been my solution.
I love iTerms sidebar tabs - I add emojis to mine for my key projects and any subtask just lives under the master tab like a folder.
Would love to see sidebar tabs - or it sounds like I can code my own.
While I quite liked Ghostty to being with, the lack of a scripting API quickly drove me to WezTerm before long. See: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2353
I hope they prioritize scriptability soon. It's quite important to my personal git worktree ergonomics.
I've been following this before it was made public and I'm a big Zig fan so I would definitely switch to this, but I've tried and failed many times. Currently it just keeps crashing multiple times (on three different machines) each day on my mac and the quick terminal doesn't support full screen mode (it still shows the menu bar). I could live with the menu bar showing, but because of the constant crashing I'll wait for a bit and check back in a few months.
How's the latency? I've had to keep using xterm even though it kind of sucks just because it's got the lowest latency by quite a bit.
I have a terminal manager project[0] I'm currently using xterm for, but very curious to try libghostty. Have mainly been hesitant because it hasn't been promoted from an internal ghostty dependency (only awareness of the place was from this article by the creator[1]), but from the sounds of it here people are finding it stable enough. Gonna give it a whirl today.
[0]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit [1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
Feature request: renaming tabs! Helps keep tabs organized instead of 20 tabs with similar names. (See Zed for example)
Also! I'm considering Ghostty web (https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web) for my project Ink Web. It's awesome that Ghostty can work in the browser to replace xterm.js.
https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1
Project: https://www.ink-web.dev/
Ghostty is awesome, ill echo the sentiment regarding lack of IPC/scripting API being my current hold back. Sticking with kitty til then. I still keep the ghostty binary on hand so I can +boo :^)
for libghostty consumers, favorite i've tried so far is neurosnap/zmx.
Tried Ghostty several times and I really appreciate the font rendering, but I keep going back to iTerm2 and Terminal.app mostly because of lack of scroll back & CMD-F, etc. Looking forward to what is coming in the next release.
We often see Ghostty on the front page. What makes this project special? Is it solving a big problem with current terminal apps?
Curious to hear some more recommendations, I settled on using lxterminal which works well enough. I couldn't get wezterm to recognize fonts on ALpine no matter what I did, kitty doesn't support tabs and ghosttty sounds like it has issues with ssh connections? I feel like I tried most at some point but if anyone has suggestions for a tabbed terminal emulator nicer than lxterminal, ideally with transparency, I'd love to hear them.
i hope they implement something that can be used with tmux -CC mode.
Ive been using Ghostty after AI recommended it for lightweight claude sessions.
No complaints been happy using it for my claude swarms for about a month
Ghostty's terminfo entry doesn't enable 24-bit color*, and as far as I can tell they don't provide a "ghostty-direct" entry that does. It just seemed odd that it's completely supported and working, yet not easily enabled. Maybe I just missed a trick, and didn't need to make a custom terminfo entry myself?
* "msgcat --color=test" is an easy test that shows the blending of 24-bit color, or blocky gradients otherwise.
Why use this over iterm 2?
Really nice terminal.
Unfortunately scrolling in terminal apps via mouse wheel seems to be broken (on release and main branch), which is currently a blocker for me. Hope this will be fixed soon.
What kind of features am I missing if I just use GNOME Terminal?
Can't use it yet because I need cmd-f find.
I expected this to point to the 1.3.0 release since it’s expected in March. Hopefully we get that soon.
If there wasn't kitty I'd definitely be using Ghostty, but I have no reason to switch.
I tried this out after getting annoyed for the 100th time by a recent bug in kgx/console that will occasionally fail to launch windows leaving incomplete windows as tabs.
Console has long since become abandonware pushing people towards ptyxis which is now the default gnome terminal. A damn shame considering console is basically complete software (the quality of software in gnome is on a downhill).
I would have given ptyxis a chance if they didn't take a basic terminal and added some fluff (features related to distrobox) on top of other annoying things I can't be bothered to remember about because I ended up removing the software every time I gave it a spin.
In just a few days I've been able to replace console with ghostty-nightly and I don't miss anything.
Damn I’m jealous that they figured out how to pay their contributors. I’ve been toiling away for free
The minimum-contrast feature is great, to help in those times when some color combination would have been unreadable otherwise.
Why is it in the main page? It's a super well-known project no?
I like how snappy Ghostty is. I do not like how it starts lagging after a few alt-tabs to Chrome and back on Linux.
I enjoy it, and it’s great to have another modern high performance terminal as an option for macOS and Linux.
For me, Kitty still has the edge:
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
WezTerm is also a strong contender:
Ghostty is fast and feels native, but WezTerm occupies a different niche: it's a terminal you program rather than configure.
The Lua config isn't just "dynamic" in the abstract sense. I built a tmuxinator-style workspace manager that spawns project-specific layouts - named tabs, splits, working directories, startup commands - from a fuzzy launcher. Session state auto-saves every 10 minutes with timestamped snapshots and crash recovery. Theme toggling between dark and light mode triggers a system-wide theme switch script. These are runtime behaviors, not static settings - try doing any of that in TOML.
The built-in multiplexer is the other major differentiator. Splits, directional navigation, pane zoom, pane selection with alphabet overlays, moving panes between tabs or windows, all without a tmux prefix key. It's not just "WezTerm has splits too, it's that the interaction model is fundamentally more fluid when there's no mode switching.
WezTerm isn't trying to be the fastest terminal. It's trying to be the most programmable one, and for people who want their terminal to work as a development environment rather than a PTY renderer, that tradeoff is worth it.
On the new mac tahoe with rounded corners (which are really frustrating to me), ghostty should add small margin on the bottom, because the font is sometimes renedered on it and letters are cut (rarely but infuriating, when it happens)
I keep trying it but keep coming back to alacritty on Linux and iterm2 on osx.
I can't find an alternative to Terminator, being able to drag and drop panels to create layouts is such a strong workflow that it's very hard to give up
I did give Ghostty a try, the turn off was Adwaita, the tablet UI for the tabs and context menu.. i just can't
I use it but have people trier cmux?
Bigger than ghostty is libghostty which enables things like: https://www.cmux.dev/
This is a test comment
It's a nice terminal but it cannot be configured to the same level as iTerm, e.g. in terms of colors, look and feel, how the menus work, how the tabs work, etc.
Also, in practice, I find it hard to detect any performance difference between iTerm and Ghostty even though I know in theory that Ghostty is more performant...
So for now I go with iTerm because I prefer the UI.
just installed ghostty, looks cool. but my honest question is how it is significantly better than iterm2 to justify such a switch? I am aware of the fact that it is faster, uses less memory, various configurations is more straight forward. but is that all?
I have the feeling that I must be missing something big here.
It’s a shame that version 1.2.x got abandoned and didn’t receive any important bug fixes. That has severely cut my trust into this project. It’s been over 4 months since the last 1.2.3 release, so the memory leak when using Claude is not addressed, my Ghostty crashes are not addressed (crash reporter doesn’t work), I don’t even bother looking at the issues anymore, as I know I am not getting the fixes for a long time.
And I’m not running a critical piece of productivity software on a nightlies channel!
Bro randomly decides to post a link to ghosty docs and gets 275 points
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Ghostty calls itself "feature rich" but only added cmd+F / find functionality a few months ago. Makes me wonder what other basic functions it's missing.
I'm the original creator of Ghostty. It's been a few years now! I don't know why this is on the front page of HN again but let me give some meaningful updates across the board.
First, libghostty is _way more exciting_ nowadays. It is already backing more than a dozen terminal projects that are free and commercial: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty I think this is the real future of Ghostty and I've said this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders.
On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time.
Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.
Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time).
That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.