[nihsett]

Does ghostty have any features that makes it better than kitty in anyway? I keep seeing this all over the place, but I still don't understand why it's better than existing options.

Can someone help who's used both help me, what's the elevator pitch for this, why is it worth checking out?

[lemontheme]

Having used it for three weeks before coming back to Kitty, my conclusions were that it’s a better terminal for people who need a terminal but don’t ‘live in’ their terminal. Ghostty just feels really polished and ‘native’ and it’s obviously faster than, say, iterm or the stock term on macOS. So Ghostty is what I would now recommend to anyone who just wants a nice terminal without the goal of turning it into a highly personalized IDE, like Kitty allows you to do.

The only feature of Ghostty that I now miss in Kitty: setting the text size of each window pane independently. Oh and the slightly smoother quake terminal, even though I don’t use that much.

Ghostty makes some choices that I personally find bizarre. For one, on macOS, cmd+, opens config in textedit instead of in $EDITOR. Another is there isn’t a key action for moving panes; you need to use the mouse. At least half of the config options are platform-specific. And weirdest of all scripting is limited and can only really be done with (get this) AppleScript.

So, like I surmised (and I could be wrong, of course), Ghostty is just a nice terminal that lives alongside your other apps; Kitty is powerful enough to practically act like a second desktop environment (that is also cross-platform).

Of course, this post is about libghostty, the underlying term emulator library. And that is an amazing contribution to the ecosystem! Zmx, herdr, soon neovim, now emacs, hopefully someday Zed – so many things can now embed an amazingly performant terminal