Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0
38 comments
·January 31, 2025jemmyw
I'm a little puzzled why Ghostty is so suddenly popular. I've tried it, it's OK but it's not as good as kitty, and it's implementing the protocols that kitty invented to make the terminal experience better. Kitty is cross platform, fast, visually pared back, and really featured. I keep finding new things like it's got a protocol for copying files over ssh sessions, and the hints system is really neat.
jwr
> it's not as good as kitty
I can answer that from a very pragmatic point of view. I was able to download ghostty and get it to run the way I expected in about 5 minutes. Everything was smooth, intuitive, and the defaults were very good.
I tried many other terminal apps in the past and was always unimpressed, so I kept using Terminal.app. Ghostty is the first terminal emulator in years that worked better than Terminal.app.
flohofwoe
Kitty on Mac has a few visual issues that Ghostty doesn't have:
- the text rendering looks slightly blurry when comparing side by side (Kitty looks blurry, Wezterm and Ghostty look crisp)
- when resizing the window, the window content 'wobbles' (Ghostty is stable, both Kitty and Wezterm have the resize wobble)
This wobbling effect is a known issue with Metal views (no idea tbh why Apple can't fix that in the window system), the solution is to 'anchor' the view to one window side during resizing (although not perfect, since during the maximize transition the window content doesn't scale), but the basic wobbling fix is fairly simple: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/963
In general I have the impression that Kitty feels quite 'heavy' on macOS compared to both Wezterm and Ghostty (and iTerm2 which I used before feels heavier than all those combined).
laserbeam
It's new. It's led by a star dev. It has sane defaults. It's written in a new programming language, so devs can learn from it if they're interested in the language (there are only a handful production ready projects written in zig so far).
I'm also sticking to kitty, 'cause I use some of the more funky features. But if I were to recommend a terminal to a newbie, I would recommend ghostty as it really cares about having a good default experience.
ulbu
yes, it's really plug-and-play. and the standard to which every feature was held from the start inspires confidence in its future; as opposed to alacritty with its "just use another terminal then, we're not considering this", and wezterm, whose kitty keyboard protocol implementation had more bugs than not (can't hold it against them - the protocol is nice but the document called its "spec" is just ghastly). They're still great, of course.
and Mitchell is pleasant and very approachable, as opposed to Kovid.
I've been using it for almost a year now and I just never noticed it at all, it's been seamless. A great example of Zuhandenheit.
paraboul
Agreed. Ghostty has become my goto Zig reference.
itsn0tm3
I think Ghostty outperforms Kitty in font rendering, especially on high-resolution, high-DPX displays like MacBooks. It also offers integrated session management—both features I personally value highly. That said, Kitty is still an excellent terminal.
nitinreddy88
Pretty much same. I didn't find anything its doing substantial from kitty and copied almost all good things from kitty
Munksgaard
I'm still not sure why I should switch away from alacritty...
oldpersonintx
intersection of geek-cred author + hipster language
but its actually fine software
milgrim
I really enjoy using it so far.
I know it's subjective, but it feels fast and lean, while iTerm felt cluttered. I really like WezTerm also, but not having a quake style terminal meant that I used iTerm in parallel. So being able to use only Ghostty now is super nice. I just hope that support for tabs in the quick terminal (that's the quake style terminal in Ghostty) is coming at some point.
It'a also great to see how quickly Mitchell reacts to issues on GitHub. It was nice to report an issue and see it fixed only a few hours after that.
knuckleheads
Ghostty is great and a lot of fun, only thing missing to me is search scrollback. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189 They know about this and I think the current answer from them is just use tmux or the like. Only thing missing though, otherwise a fun pleasant experience.
sethammons
This is the only thing missing for me and my teams. You run a test suite and it failed. Cmd+f should allow me to search for error or failure messages.
stared
I use the default macOS Terminal with the fish shell and starship prompt, and I'm quite happy with it.
I see people raving about Ghostty, though I'm not sure what I'm missing. What features do you find most compelling about it?
verghese
Switched over from Iterm - A fundamental feature I'm missing is the search feature (Cmd + F).
CSDude
This has been the major frustration for me as well. That's the only thing missing for me.
postepowanieadm
Shouldn't it be handled by your shell? I know it's a question without the correct answer - I'm struggling with deciding what should be handled by wm, terminal, terminal multiplexer, shell, text editor.
pilif
The shell doesn't have access to the scrollback though. A multiplexer would, if you used one.
sethammons
One trick I have is my ghostty config loads a linked theme config that is a list of my favorite themes. On new shell, I shuffle the list. When I restart or reload config, I get a random theme I enjoy. Adds a little variety
ksynwa
> Ghostty 1.1 on Linux now supports server-side decorations (SSD) for compositors that support it.
God bless
> For X11, we could not find a well-supported protocol for SSD, so we continue to use CSD.
Noo
justmarc
Liking it a lot so far. Keep it up!
mi_lk
Any plan to implement Copy Mode similar to WezTerm?
linsomniac
Copy Mode and Quick Select are two things in Wezterm that I use all. the. time. The other killer feature is the remote multiplexing, because it gives a better experience than ssh+tmux. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html
karel-3d
I am using the terminal that's in VSCode. I guess that's not very cool.
reader9274
Found a weird bug.
Running: `cat /dev/urandom` causes a crash.
I never understood the argument "its fast" All of them are fast? I mean, iTerm had a period in my life where it felt clunky, but I've never had a "slow" terminal. Alscritty, kitty, etc. are all pretty fast themselves