[danilafe]

I keep seeing Ghostty in the news, and I've tried it, but it feels like just another terminal emulator to men. This coming from someone who spends 90% of the workday in the terminal.

Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?

[throwaway2037]

Here is the full about page it: https://ghostty.org/docs/about

Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)

[novella_rel]

To me it has a couple advantages over the other options on the market.

1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.

2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.

3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.

The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.

[Gormo]

I tried it a few months ago, and didn't perceive any of those items as particular benefits.

1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.

2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.

3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.

[Vinnl]

What's an example of a thing you usually need to fiddle with? I feel like 1 and 3 are already true for my existing native terminal emulators, which I also never configure. So presumably there are things Ghostty does that aren't enabled by default on my other ones that I could take advantage of?

[kombine]

I've been using Kitty terminal and they are absolutely comparable in the feature set: GPU-based rendering, speed, customisation. OS-native controls in Ghostty are not very important to me, I like terminal being a terminal, not a GUI.

[theasisa]

I've been using Tabby on MacOS but Kitty looks neat, I'll give it a go. Thanks for mentioning it!

[alexalx666]

ghostty is faster than kitty (MBP M4 Max), I did not expect that

[cess11]

It's good at what it does. Starts quickly, doesn't get bogged down when dumping large amounts of text into it, got some nice themes.

I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.

My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.

[cbolton]

Ghostty is quite slow to start on my Linux machine, very close the the first start of GNOME Terminal (or Terminator). Maybe because I'm on Wayland? Are you on X?

[59nadir]

I had this issue a few years ago with certain applications and came to find out that it had to do specifically with them using GTK. I googled for it and found the fix, and after all the same apps started practically instantly. Could this be what you're running into?

(I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me about this particular issue.)

[cbolton]

Maybe? I've tried removing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome as it seems to cause slow startup for other people but that doesn't seem to fix it.

[cess11]

Yeah, I'm still on X. I'll make the switch when I haven't heard a friend get really annoyed by something Wayland related in a year or so. It's a Debian system. Not sure if it matters but there's an RTX A500 in the machine.

So, perhaps? For a while I was on a local compile of 1.0.0, and a while ago I started pulling the nightly sources and build from those.

[jwr]

It's just better in every way than anything else I have ever tried (at least on a Mac). The author cares and it shows.

BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.

[eviks]

It would be helpful if you actually listed the ways and the else

[agos]

For one, it’s way faster than both iTerm and terminal.app, the two most used terminal apps on MacOS

[jwr]

Yes, it would.

[blazinglyfast]

Have you tried kitty?

[ckbkr10]

As another person that spends the whole day in the terminal. It's sad to see there is no Windows version. I do not understand why I would need gpu acceleration for a terminal, but I would still try it.

I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash

[srcreigh]

I like that ghostty supports bitmap fonts. Kitty doesn’t (and won’t) support those.

I also like the “ghostty +list-themes” command and the splash page animation on their site.

[tiborsaas]

I used iTerm2 a lot, configured it to my liking, but then I tried Ghostty for curiosity and for some reason I sticked to it. I think it's just cleaner and leaner and the default looks pretty cool and minimalistic, I don't really miss anything from iTerm.

Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.