Libghostty is coming

https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming

by kingori • 10 months ago

828 266 10 months ago

mitchellh.com

asadm• 10 months ago

ooh a web version would be insanely cool.

jasonjmcghee• 10 months ago

Such incredible news. I'm absolutely going to use this.

jrop4• 10 months ago

I've been keeping an eye on this in the hopes that text-reflow (edit: including for scrollback) could be solved in Neovim-based terminals [1]. I'm loving the innovation Ghostty is bringing to the terminal space.

1. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/33155

jez2• 10 months ago

Do you consider yourself a neovim terminal power user?

I tried a while back to invert my workflow (from tmux driving neovim to neovim driving terminals) because I thought it might be easier to only ever have one buffer open for a given file, instead of attempting to open a file in a given pane only to realize that it's already open in a different neovim instance in a different pane.

When I was testing that stuff out I don't think I noticed particular issues with text reflow that would benefit from being solved by swapping to libghostty, rather my pain points were just about how to adjust to the different paradigm. I'd be curious to hear more about someone who is all in on Neovim embedded terminals (and possibly how libghostty might make it better).

jrop4• 10 months ago

I do indeed live in the terminal (all day due to work), but tmux adds too much value for me to do all terminal management in Neovim (tmux session-management being what I use most). I've just encountered too many visual "glitches" in the Neovim terminal to rely on it for everything. That's not to say, however, that I never use the built-in Neovim :terminal.

I thought it might be easier to only ever have one buffer open for a given file, instead of attempting to open a file in a given pane only to realize that it's already open in a different neovim instance

This is not a problem in my config:

    vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ 'FocusGained', 'BufEnter', 'CursorHold' }, {
      pattern = '\*',
      command = 'silent! checktime',
    })

Since `'autoread'` is by default `on` in Neovim, this seamlessly reloads the buffer if the underlying file has been updated on disk.

c-hendricks• 10 months ago

I'm all in on Neovim terminals, having a remote development setup means it keeps my terminal with my neovim window (I use nvim-qt).

Also not sure how ghostty would help, haven't noticed text reflowing issues.

It's not bad, a little awkward getting used to:

- you might want a plugin to give you a "persistent" terminal across all tabs

- I still haven't found a way to clear scroll back while a command is running

- I had to set up mappings for easier exiting terminal mode (c-\ c-n really sucks)

- I had to set up events so whenever a terminal buffer is focused it immediately enters insert mode. While I love vim, I've never wanted modal editing in a terminal

iammrpayments• 10 months ago

I wish they had used something like this in Shopify, instead they decided it was a good idea to embed VScode in the browser in case users want to make a small modification to theme files, it even has a 5 second boot time.

ComputerGuru• 10 months ago

What’s a user-friendly mouse friendly modeless cli text editor you can compile to wasm?

Wingy• 10 months ago

micro?

cultofmetatron• 10 months ago

I don't think its really practical to do so. wasm can't directly access the canvas or webgpu contexts. it has to route date through js anyways so you will always have js code in the loop here.

bigwheels• 10 months ago

This is super cool, it will be so nice to have a truly omni-platform terminal emulator that can even conceivably extend to iOS and Android.

Aside: I didn't realize Ghostty was written in Zig, wow. The first Zig-thing I'm aware of using on a regular basis. It's amusing the repository structure looks exactly like a Golang layout, haha.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

ldemailly2• 10 months ago

It doesn’t (look like a go layout) and that’s a good thing because pkg/ src/ etc aren’t good go directories.

metaltyphoon2• 10 months ago

Since go 1.25 you can declare the what is the “root” of a go module, which is a good thing. Not everyone wants the top level directory filled with go files specially in a multi language repo. So this idea that /src is not good go directory will soon be outdated.

keaaww2• 10 months ago

Not omni-platform if you have macOS < 13. It's the author's prerogative to set minimum requirements, of course, but for something "basic" (note the quotes) like a terminal emulator, not having far-reaching backwards platform compatibility is a deal-breaker for many. Life's hard enough for macOS users who don't want to upgrade the OS every 6 months and/or replace hardware every 2 years. For people like me who prefer to run their systems as purchased until the hardware fails, the "move forward or get left behind" upgrade mentality is very troublesome.

Hopefully libghostty will be much more permissive. No dependencies (not even libC) is a good sign that will be true.

(written on a 2018 macbook pro running macOS 10.14.6, which still works great in every way)

nixosbestos2• 10 months ago

I would pay money to never have users like you, even if my software incidentally worked on your intentionally terribly out-dated system.

trial34• 10 months ago

i desperately want to use ghostty but cmd+f support is just such a dealbreaker. excited about this development though!

jrop4• 10 months ago

It's on the roadmap: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

trial34• 10 months ago

oh, incredible! i'll keep my eyes peeled and will be switching to it from iTerm the moment it's available

esafak4• 10 months ago

Can someone explain why this was not one of the first features added? Who doesn't want to search their history? There must be some complication.

Mitchell raised the issue himself two years ago: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

SG-2• 10 months ago

probably because you never volunteered to code it up.

but really not all features can make it in 1.0

przmk• 10 months ago

As someone who lives in the terminal, I can't say I've ever had the need to do that. It's only by reading the comments that I've realised that there's no search in Ghostty.

swah3• 10 months ago

Guessing its "hard to do it right".

nhumrich• 10 months ago

I have heard this from a lot of people, yet here I am, using a terminal that supports this, and have yet to ever do it. Can you help me understand what workflows you depend on Ctrl+f for? I wonder if I am missing something big.

esafak4• 10 months ago

Don't you ever need to search through a program's output; e.g., to find what failed? Otherwise you'll have to remember to tee everything to a file every time you run a command.

Tossrock• 10 months ago

You could run tmux inside it and bind cmd f to copy-mode + /

timeon• 10 months ago

i desperately want to use ghostty

Is there any particular reason?

Imustaskforhelp7• 10 months ago

Curiosity?

trial34• 10 months ago

iterm2 is slow, uses a ton of memory, and keeps adding weird bloat/AI garbo

yankcrime• 10 months ago

You can map something like cmd+shift+f to open the entire buffer in your default text editor, this has been sufficient for a lot of folks - myself included - while we wait for native scrollback search to land.

trial34• 10 months ago

wow yankcrime describing a literal vi yank crime. i'll give it a try this week, that's helpful

sionisrecur• 10 months ago

I started using it months ago and don't miss that so much, if I really can't rerun the command and pipe it to less/grep. I'll just use the mouse to copy it to the clipboard and then run `xclip -o` (linux) or `pbpaste` (mac) and pipe it to grep. I know there's a keybinding for putting the buffer in a file, but copying with the mouse is faster than finding it.

Also, not sure if this is by default or it picked it up from my old iTerm2 configuration, but cmd+shift+up/down navigates through prompt lines so it's easy to find the start of a long command. My PS1 in zsh is:

    PS1='%1~ %F{green}»%f '

hackitup7• 10 months ago

I love how this guy founds + takes public + sells a multibillion company and then just goes right back to hacking. Legend.

rwmj• 10 months ago

And hacking on tty software too, the geekiest corner of the Unix tech stack.

buildbot• 10 months ago

I love ghostty and use it daily, somehow I missed it was by Mitchell Hashimoto! Very cool to see.

krferriter• 10 months ago

I had tried it briefly previously but in the last couple months I think I have made the permanent switch from iterm2. It's so much snappier and simpler and also reliably handles text reflowing when a long line wraps, which was a constant problem I had in iterm2, where it would insert fake newlines when copying out text that was wrapped.

I also like that I can have my config in a little plaintext file and just drop it onto a new computer and get the same keybindings. I am using the terminator keybindings for creating and navigating between split panes.

qaq• 10 months ago

100% Legend love Ghostty btw :)

kortex• 10 months ago

Hashimoto is an absolute wizard, but what I find most compelling about him is his absolutely uncanny ability to segment and abstract systems and interfaces in a way for maximum composability and minimal entanglement. He's like the walking embodiment of Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy philosophy. It's like he designs software systems in such a way that they have no choice but to operate correctly and predictably.

Also I just tried Ghostty for the first time. With iTerm2 and the Zsh/Powerlevel10k theme, there's an extremely brief but perceptible lag from running a command and the render. In ghostty it feels actually instant.

alostpuppy• 10 months ago

I love ghostty. The only thing that is missing is a find feature which is such an odd omissions for an incredible piece of software.

jauntywundrkind• 10 months ago

The nerds would do sooo much better for ourselves if we could build a momentum behind comments like this.

Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.

As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/

This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.

ksec• 10 months ago

I only wish after 1.3 he could hand over Ghostty to others for maintenance and move to improve other things.

The software world really needs people like him to drive things forward.

hoppp2• 10 months ago

He has the skills and the time to make the best possible software and he's doin it for free Respect for that.

giancarlostoro2• 10 months ago

Basically MariaDB. He (original creator of MySQL) sold MySQL for a Billion dollars (iirc) forked it, created MariaDB and kept at it. It's been what 15 years now?

internetter• 10 months ago

Wrong person. You're thinking of Michael “Monty” Widenius, not Mitchell Hashimoto

deadbabe• 10 months ago

Wow, I wonder what his everyday life must be like.

nosequel• 10 months ago

Also, in real life, he's a genuine nice guy. I had lunch with him and Armon at a conference when they worked at Kiip, before they founded Hashicorp. Mitchell (to me) was the proper hacker. He just loved everything about computing. This particular conference was about distributed systems and he was just geeking out on everything.

I walked away thinking that no matter what they did, they'd probably be successful. I was extremely happy to find Ghostty and have been using it ever since.

oblio• 10 months ago

You made me look into HashiCorp again. It's a great company from a developers perspective, in terms of the many useful tools created: Vagrant, Packer, Nomad, Consul, etc

However their financials are... LOL

Revenue US$583 million (2024)

Operating income US$−254 million (2024)

50% loss margin :-)))

n4bz0r• 10 months ago

This can't be right. How are they still afloat?

Actually, that's the question (or rather the feeling) I had even before seeing these numbers. Just by reading the docs and looking at everything they built (and how they built it) made me wonder if they spend more than they make. That's a really funny feeling I never had before. Like, surely economies can't be that forgiving when it comes to polishing things. Is that what's happening to the company? Mere overspending?

godelski9• 10 months ago

I just want to say, what a dream. To have wealth and be able to create projects for the sake of going the projects. To not have to make the concessions of quality for profits.

There's an old Knuth quote:

  > In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.

In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth

  > If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads. Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?

I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?

Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?

mikestorrent• 10 months ago

What we are missing is a sponsorship model that is able to fun this kind of thing. It's not infeasible - look at university grants dispersement as an example of the overwrought predecessor of this. A ton of money moves through such institutions, and funds a lot of interesting projects.

One thing I've been envisioning is something like a "certified B corporation" style qualification that companies can get that indicates they contribute financially back to open source commensurate to the amount of it they consume to run their core business. If everything you do runs through open source software, in a moral sense, one can make the argument that you owe something back to it.

ivanstepanovftw• 10 months ago

Yeah, it is so hard to be born and raised in California.

I cannot imagine what he went through.

Hero.

johnisgood• 10 months ago

From the author himself: "My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it.".

Honestly, good for him [for doing well financially] and for admitting that he is privileged, and above all, being thankful for it.

carwyn• 10 months ago

How does this compare to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/ ?

loeg4• 10 months ago

The ghostty version probably doesn't write the entire scrollback buffer to disk (given its lack of dependencies).

Narushia• 10 months ago

Vte is GTK-only, while libghostty aims to be cross-platform.

tristan957• 10 months ago

libghostty will eventually export a Terminal widget that can be used in GTK as well, so in that regard they serve a similar purpose.

duskwuff• 10 months ago

For that matter: how does it compare to libvterm (https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/)?

mitchellh4• 10 months ago

libvterm is great. Ghostty supports many more features, but the most important I hear from other libvterm users are that it's missing scrollback and reflow on resize, which are both pretty major pieces of functionality.

Example: Neovim is considering the switch to libghostty-vt when its ready. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/33155

jdorfman2• 10 months ago

The passion and attention to detail Mitchell has for developer experience is beyond me. I remember the first time I used Vagrant (2011, Santa Monica California) like it was yesterday it was that impactful.

I never thought in a million years I would even think of ditching iTerm2 but when Ghostty dropped I installed it and fell in love.

x3n0ph3n3• 10 months ago

What exactly does it do better than iTerm2? I gave it a try a few weeks ago and wasn't at all impressed, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

jdorfman2• 10 months ago

Great question. For me it feels faster (anecdotally) and certain TUI components don’t break. It also is probably my bias of loving his work as well as everyone at work using it. Hive mentality I suppose.

drob518• 10 months ago

Kind of surprised that we haven’t created this library before now. But glad to see it coming.

Biganon3• 10 months ago

On the very day ghostty refuses to load my theme because themes now start with an uppercase letter; the same day I'm no longer able to enter `^` (a caret) for some reason. Not to mention the multiple times where the clipboard suddenly and completely stopped functioning, in the last few weeks.

I love ghostty, but if it keeps suddenly failing for no apparent reason I might have to go back to wezterm.

paraboul• 10 months ago

Chill, there was literally one single update since the initial launch. It's not like it's getting breaking changes every day.

SG-2• 10 months ago

damn, you should ask for a refund.

Biganon3• 10 months ago

Sorry, I hadn't realized only positive feedback was allowed here.

ralgozino• 10 months ago

You seem to be using tip. Switch to using a stable release (1.2 is the latest one) instead if you don't want to be exposed to potential issues.

FWIW I've using tip since the closed beta and never had major issues.

HellsMaddy• 10 months ago

Super exciting. I hope to be able to embed a Ghostty-backed terminal into my Rust app in the future. Amazing work as always, Mitchell!

NotaRat• 10 months ago

I love the idea of libghostty making terminal tunnels cleaner and less leaky, because I hate messy pipes.

x0n• 10 months ago

problem: we have ten different VT terminal parsers

solution: write a new VT terminal parser to replace the other ten

result: we have eleven different VT terminal parsers

hamdouni• 10 months ago

Mandatory reference

https://xkcd.com/927/

Pet_Ant2• 10 months ago

I really want a little adapter that can plug into a monitor to make it a dumb terminal. Instantly on, no full OS, just a VT100 or something.

I've looked into it with a PiZero and some HATs but I'd like something made by smarter people. This would be perfect for that.

Ideally just some dip-switchs to set the terminal to emulate and set the display resolution.

ldemailly2• 10 months ago

Then what would you do? serial port? ssh? what is your terminal connected to if you don’t have an OS?

Pet_Ant2• 10 months ago

Serial port or serial port over "ethernet"[1] (technically it's 8p8c[2]).

My router doesn't have a video port, but it does have a dummy terminal port. I had to scrounge a video card for my server to set it up, but it does have a serial port [3]. So that would have been nice.

Also would be nice for a modern remake of dumb terminal with abandoned monitors.

[1] https://www.cabling-design.com/references/pinouts/EIA-TIA-56...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_connector#8P8C

[3] https://serverfault.com/a/529159

eigencoder• 10 months ago

I was really excited to try ghostty, but the text looks blurry when I place it on my mac's external monitor

tdhz77• 10 months ago

I enjoy ghostty and zellij. Zig and rust built.

sigalor• 10 months ago

Will there also be a React component? Or is this not intended for web frontends? I was wondering, because Vercel et al. were mentioned in the beginning.

PokestarFan• 10 months ago

They mention it's compiled to WASM.

zenlot2• 10 months ago

I use ghostty daily now. Switched recently. In macOS I can re-map now caps lock to be cmd and it works for cmd+c. Everything else is great, sensible defaults and what's not easily customizable.

Gruvbox light theme looks great too.

The fact it's written in Zig is awesome too, if you ever question if Zig is ready, ghostty is your answer to that.

Not seeing myself going back. It's great experience.

Tip: if you combine your ghostty flow with aerospace, it's nearly perfect setup for your keyboard only experience on mac.

epolanski• 10 months ago

Other huge projects are Clickhouse and Bun.

nasretdinov• 10 months ago

ClickHouse is written in C++ (un)fortunately. Although I do think that Zig would fit it quite well too

ordinaryradical• 10 months ago

I think you’re thinking of TigerBeetle, not Clickhouse, which is a quite performant db with a fascinating simulation-tested story and proof of performance / safety.

doctoboggan• 10 months ago

Can you tell my why I should consider ghostty? (as a daily Terminal.app user)

PyWoody2• 10 months ago

It's fast. Like, faster than your brain expects it to be.

I live in vim and after about 30 seconds of checking ghostty out I switched from iTerm2 to ghostty for good. No regerts.

zenlot2• 10 months ago

Fast. Very fast. Good configuration and theming options too. Literally no lag, even with thousands of lines scrollback. It doesn't get in your way on your day to day terminal activities. Feels natural.

micampe• 10 months ago

Everyone telling you that it's fast because iTerm2 is slow. Terminal.app is already faster than iTerm2 and on par o very close to most other alternatives in terms of speed.

I also used Terminal until recently and don't use any of the advanced features alternatives provide. The main reason to switch from Terminal.app is truecolor support. The terminfo thing is annoying but I just setenv TERM in ssh config. Better split panes is nice. Configuration in a text file is a matter of taste, but documentation is good.

Igrom3• 10 months ago

I want to use this to modernize vterm in Emacs. If I could only synchronize the terminal cursor and the Emacs point, and preserve lines as lines, not split them...

kccqzy• 10 months ago

I wasn't aware that vterm need modernizing. Happy user of vterm at work and ghostty at home!

Karrot_Kream• 10 months ago

vterm flickers a lot with any busier TUI. Claude Code sucks in vterm. I'd also really look forward to using libghostty to try an alternative to vterm in emacs.

xz18r2• 10 months ago

I am not sure i understand your problem 100% but Emacs’ tty package can solve a lot of cursor issues in a terminal emulator.

Igrom3• 10 months ago

The packages available through list-packages that contain "tty" in the name or description are: clipetty, crappy-jsp-mode, file-info, glass-tty-theme, hatty, hima-theme, hyperkitty, ipretty, kkp, latex-pretty-symbols, melancholy-theme, mistty, mkdown, nubox, org-pretty-tags, ppp, pretty-hydra, pretty-mode, pretty-sha-path, pretty-speedbar, pretty-symbols, purty-mode and tabbar-ruler. There is no package "tty". Are you talking about emacs' own shell?

sigbottle• 10 months ago

How easy would it be to implement a tmux shim application that just has line numbers natively in the pty itself for copying?

Tmux copy mode is already great, my one gripe is no line numbers.

This script https://gist.github.com/Nimmidev/2cf4d5cc80dce32d0240ec7b3cf... is pretty good, but I still get frequent bugs with it, and also it just doesn't work in fullscreen mode (2 panes).

The core issue is that it's allocating a new tmux pane with the sole goal of mirroring line numbers; it would be nice if they synced up in the same pane, avoiding the above issue.

Piping it into neovim is an option that you can do on both neovim and zellij. zellij loses colors, and neovim is probably the best solution to this problem but then again I don't want to have to remember to turn on/off line numbers every time and I personally like one-off panes. Separation of responsibilities, I guess.

Long-winded rant to basically say: would a standard like this solve my issue easier? From what I understand of terminals, I would need to parse the underlying pty, maintain a scrollback buffer internally in the wrapper shim, and also be able to dynamically adjust toggling line numbers on/off.

If I'm doing this kind of translation, how "leaky" will the abstraction be until I'm basically re-implementing the logic in my middle layer, assuming that "for free" I can get the translation both in and out from the pty?

I've been trying to look closer at TUI tools, but that's what really bothered me. Given just how god awful the VT protocol is, you could get the state machine parsing correct, but the developer still has to learn basically every little quirk that was added over the years, no?

(And before someone makes a false equivalence, no, this isn't the case even with languages like c++ - I'm still learning quirks about it to this day, but I don't have to learn the entire thing to build proper, robust code. It does not seem the same with something like the VT protocol. So yes, I'm aware that some learning should take place, but I'm wondering how structured of a developer experience this will end up being.)

on_the_train• 10 months ago

I have a confession: I don't know the difference between a console, terminal (-emulator?!?), shell, bash and all these things. It's all just a black window with text for me. I've never understood why people talk so much about git shell when my normal windows cmd/Powershell can do just the same git commands. I'm also a prolific and successful software engineer. These two things shouldn't mix. So please tell me what I missed in life when these things are completely alien to me.

senkora• 10 months ago

I think that you might enjoy this (paid) zine: https://store.wizardzines.com/products/terminal

The terminal seems simple at first (you type in commands and run them! no big deal!), but the more you learn, the more you notice a million little inconsistencies (why does pressing the arrow keys sometimes print out "^[[D"? why does selecting text sometimes not work? why are the colours sometimes unreadable?) that make it feel like an inscrutable black box. And it often doesn’t feel worth it to learn more because documentation about the terminal is so fragmented and full of obscure jargon.
But! Understanding just a little more about the terminal can make your experience WAY better. You can quickly recognize what’s causing a problem (“oh, my arrow keys aren’t working because this is one of those annoying REPLs that doesn’t support arrow keys!”) and immediately fix it (“I’ll use rlwrap!). Or you can turn “wow, this text is unreadable” into “oh, my terminal emulator is responsible for colours! I’ll just go into the settings and reconfigure my colours!”.

metaltyphoon2• 10 months ago

Old but amazing good small series.

https://youtu.be/07Q9oqNLXB4?si=FthNcZSYQSNnT0mP

vinceguidry3• 10 months ago

Really looking forward to this, writing my own personal editor in Ruby and not having a library for parsing terminal input is leading me to write my own kitty keyboard protocol parser (which ghostty implements) and having to hand-code lookup tables is driving me batty. I really don't like the idea of using an existing TUI framework as none of them actually implement the kitty protocol.

* https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/#

Imustaskforhelp7• 10 months ago

Have you released the project? I am somewhat curious!

Also I just went from a somewhat (niche?) languages rabbit hole and I refound crystal / crystal is in my mind currently..

So what are your thoughts on using something like crystal instead of ruby because they are similar in what I know and crystal can create a static binary while being (faster?) than ruby

I am just somewhat curious to know!

vinceguidry3• 10 months ago

It's nowhere near ready but I made a gist:

https://gist.github.com/VinceGuidry/b44f02117d452bde7471dae2...

I like crystal but without pure OO and the fact that the community is so far behind Go or even Scala it's hard for me to see a good use for it.

You can create static binaries with ruby, just use mruby. I had a bunch of small scripts in crystal that I replaced with mruby and never noticed the difference. You don't get runtime reflection or ruby's enormous library base, but it could fill the need. I may end up transcribing my editor, or perhaps just the parser, to mruby once it's ready.

https://mruby.org/docs/articles/executing-ruby-code-with-mru...

For a fully-static binary, the option you want is at the bottom,

dagi3d• 10 months ago

I recently ditched VS Code in favor of Neovim and thanks to Ghostty transition has been a success. As a Mac user I use the cmd key in tons of shortcuts and it just worked out of the box, no need to send weird escape sequences

AceJohnny2• 10 months ago

excellent feature compatibility such as parsing Kitty Graphics Protocol or Tmux Control Mode, and more

Oh oh oh!!!

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935

awww...

(while ghostty can parse Tmux Control Mode stuff, it doesn't actually implement the full feature. My dependence on iTerm2 remains...)

mitchellh4• 10 months ago

Ghostty has the capability to parse Tmux control mode (and this blog post is about libghostty-vt). Ghostty the GUI is missing the capability to map that to GUI elements. But Ghostty understands Tmux control mode today: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/src/termina...

phkahler3• 10 months ago

License: This is a perfect example of a project I think should be LGPL licensed and not MIT. Why? Let's suppose he's successful and libghostty become ubiquitous. What happens then? At some point you will be using a closed source version of it on Windows or MacOS or whatever - how do you know it's not logging in the background? The potential for this exists today in every commercial terminal emulator, but why make it easy to take something ubiquitous and backdoor it? On the flip side, what's a good reason for it to be MIT licensed?

valadaptive• 10 months ago

Am I missing something? The LGPL only applies to the library itself--you can dynamically link to it from proprietary code. So in this hypothetical scenario, someone could just write a terminal emulator (or IDE, or what have you) that dynamically links to libghostty and put as much telemetry in it as they wanted, couldn't they?

phkahler3• 10 months ago

> Am I missing something?

No, you're not but I did! So GPL then. Maybe I just wanted to make up a scenario. I'm not sure why MIT/BSD have become so popular, they have their place but I don't think they have any place in software infrastructure.

10000truths• 10 months ago

Sounds like a feature-complete successor to libtmt:

https://github.com/deadpixi/libtmt

MonkeyClub• 10 months ago

Through TFA I ended up perusing Hashimoto's blog, and from that moved on to "The Tao of HashiCorp".

Curiously, it hasn't been discussed on HN before, so I started a thread to get HNers' thoughts on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45351378

tennysont• 10 months ago

Interesting!

The nix package for ghostty is broken/unavailable on MacOS at the moment, but installing the brew cask (`brew install --cask ghostty`) and a basic config file:

```

font-family = Monaco

theme = dark:Catppuccin Frappe,light:Catppuccin Latte

```

Got me almost everything I used from iTerm2. Nerdfont just worked (in iTerm I think you have to use the `Use a different font for non-ASCII text` setting)

tambourine_man4• 10 months ago

I really want to like Ghostty but:

- Still no ⌘F for find.

- No way (that I know of) to select previous output or specific string and copy with only keyboard shortcuts.

- No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect).

- Fonts still don't render as nicely as in Terminal.app. I've fiddled with `font-thicken-strength` and it's close, but not quite. Probably impossible or very hard to replicate due to its Metal rendering nature, but when all you do is look at text all day, it matters.

azertify• 10 months ago

Search in scroll back is coming in 1.3, unfortunately that's going to be 6 months away.

There's a lot happening in the Ghostty app though, check out the 1.2 release notes

sbrother2• 10 months ago

Is there a blog post anywhere that explains why it has taken so long to get search working? Ghostty is such a nice app but that's such a fundamental feature that there has to be a good reason... It's the only thing keeping me on iTerm2.

scosman• 10 months ago

Best news I've heard all day.

sisk• 10 months ago

No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

This comment sounded familiar[0]. :) For what it's worth, still possible with:

  keybind = "cmd+.=text:\x03"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42889411

tambourine_man4• 10 months ago

Haha, thanks again :)

I've been delaying a major migration to NeoVim on [modern-terminal-I-can-never-decide-which] for years. Wezterm, Ghostty, iTerm2. None is exactly perfect, so I just keep watching them develop.

big_toast• 10 months ago

(Surely this issue must've been discussed/debated elsewhere ad nauseum because it seems an odd design decision to leave out such a common macos binding...)

But having only used ghostty as-is and getting bamboozled by the copy paste situation, this is game changing. I was just going to wait till preferences had a GUI/TUI.. So thanks!

tambourine_man4• 10 months ago

By the rollercoaster of points this post is experiencing, I may have expressed myself poorly. To be clear, the concept of a modern, cross-platform Terminal core with native GUI implementations for each major vendor is amazing and I'm very glad it exists. It's just not quite there yet for me and I don't know if it ever will be. But I'm very excited by it and hopeful.

mixmastamyk• 10 months ago

I was also downvoted for mentioning a few other minor things it is missing as well. While I'm holding out, it's getting there however.

WhyNotHugo2• 10 months ago

It’s weird to me that they consider GTK a “native” implementation — GTK is a whole [opinionated] layer of abstraction on top of the native interfaces.

It’s native in the sense that it’s not Electron, or Java, but it’s still a layer of abstraction which introduces all sorts of quirks.

shoo_pl2• 10 months ago

Not to mention that every time you ssh to another server your keyboard stops working correctly.

The solution is on their website:

infocmp -x xterm-ghostty | ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x -

I mean... I could learn what it does, but no way on earth I am going to be typing something like that every time I want to ssh somewhere.

(This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

mitchellh4• 10 months ago

(This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

"For whatever reason": because it requires modifying `ssh` and doing that by default is a really sketchy thing to do because it is a very security sensitive tool. No program (Ghostty included) should be mucking with that by default. We want users to be aware.

"Can't it just work?": No, because the entire mechanism is flawed, and I didn't invent the mechanism. It's like asking, "why must I drive to my destination, can't I just teleport?" The entire premise of the question is silly, and it's not the car's fault (Ghostty is the car in this example). For those who want to learn more about "the mechanism": read Ghostty's terminfo page, but also just do some light web searching on how terminfo works. Its a total nightmare.

I really wish that weren't the case, I really do. I promise its just as annoying to me as a user and more annoying to me as a maintainer to have to hear people complain about this repeatedly when I'm not doing anything wrong, personally. I'm playing by the rules. The rules are just bullshit.

We'll continue to make enhancements to improve this while we wait for Ghostty's terminfo to propagate to every machine in the world. It will, it'll just take... a long time. Next up we plan on introducing a `ghostty +ssh` command that you can drop-in replace most `ssh` usage with and it'll automagically just work.

darkwater• 10 months ago

  SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

in your ssh config stanza will fix that

FridgeSeal• 10 months ago

No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

Wait wait wait, this is a shortcut in Mac??

sib• 10 months ago

Seriously. I've been using Macs since... ahem... 1985... and did not know this.

mi_lk• 10 months ago

the second bullet single-handedly keeps me in WezTerm (copy/select mode)

swah3• 10 months ago

Should be soon: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

Geezus_424• 10 months ago

6 months. 1.3 does not release until March 2026.

WhyNotHugo2• 10 months ago

A few other ugly quirks in Linux:

- It doesn’t respect the user’s configured fonts. - Clipboard support is inconsistent. - The GTK4 UI is quirky, and has silly slow animations in situations which don’t make sense.

The first two sound like more serious issues, and I’m surprised that others haven’t found them dealbreakers.

ykonstant• 10 months ago

Interesting, are there issues on the tracker pertinent to those problems?

Ghoelian• 10 months ago

- No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect).

For what it's worth, that shortcut also doesn't work in the Jetbrains terminal, Alacritty, Kitty, and even iTerm2. The only terminal emulator I've tried so far where that works is the built-in Terminal.app.

riddley• 10 months ago

I want to like it too. I even joined the Discord I was so excited about it. Unfortunately even at version 1.2.0, which I understand is a total rewrite on Linux, it's only usable for minutes before this bug kicks in https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2210

steve_adams_862• 10 months ago

Interesting, I really prefer the font rendering in Ghostty! I'm with you on the first two items, though.

Despite these shortcomings I still use it daily since the first time I tried it, and have come to really love the project in general. I often won't hop to new software if it offers friction like this, but Ghostty pulled me in despite some snags.

Zed is also wonderful software, though it took me way longer to commit to using it daily.

Imustaskforhelp7• 10 months ago

I use ghostty on (my?) air mac that my brother gifted to me which was his previous device for coding / general purpose etc.

Ghostty is really good and I genuinely appreciate this.

Honestly, Might seem like a small thing but the fact that this doesn't even depend on libc seems to be a really great thing to me and I kinda cherish it!

Thanks! Have a nice day!

Phelinofist• 10 months ago

Why is not depending on a libc a good thing? Aren't they then rolling their own syscall wrappers?

the_real_cher3• 10 months ago

How is he such an absolute chad of a developer?

He has side projects that would make careers for most of us.

Imustaskforhelp7• 10 months ago

Mitchell and bellard and to somewhat degree fwsgonzo (you might not know him but I absolutely like his work on libriscv, the game he's working and the kvm sandbox which he's working on too) are my definitions of literal coding chads.

People should really measure coding proficiency as being 10% of these guys or some fraction instead of whatever metric they are using now (slightly kidding ofc)

They are the 10x developers and I feel like this sentiment is echoed all across the industry

the_real_cher3• 10 months ago

Ive worked with 10x people before. All these people you mention and Torvalds too seem to be 100x developers.

threecheese3• 10 months ago

I thought ‘chad’ was a pejorative; is Chad good again? :)

the_real_cher3• 10 months ago

I though it just means an exceptional alpha male type. I didn't know it was ever pejorative.

siavosh• 10 months ago

Total newb here - but lets say i want to make a terminal based video game (think old school text / visuals / menus), will something like Libghostty be something relevant to that?

beepbooptheory• 10 months ago

I imagine if you wanted to make a self-contained application so non-command-line users can play it, then maybe you could use it. Otherwise, probably out of scope of the game itself.

esseph3• 10 months ago

This is for terminal/ttys, this isn't something you'd use for game dev. There are tons of other tools out there for that

amiga386• 10 months ago

No, you would use ncurses, or a library built on it (like Curses Development Kit, CDK)

JdeBP• 10 months ago

To expand on the other replies: There are two very different tasks here.

This library would be for the task of taking a received ECMA-48 character stream and turning that into a series of actions on some sort of model of a terminal's display, keyboard, and mouse.

You are looking at a library for the (roughly) inverse task of taking a model of UI widgets and turning that into a transmitted ECMA-48 character stream.

Here's an example of the former:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decode...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/SoftTerm.h

Here's an example of the latter:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Output...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIDisplayCo...

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIVIO.h

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/TUIVIOWidget...

kelvinjps• 10 months ago

How does Ghostty compares to kitty and alacrity?

piannucci• 10 months ago

Someone call @keithw. He put a tremendous amount of brainpower into getting the Unicode side of this puzzle "right" (or, as "right" as it is possible to be) when he wrote mosh. I'm sure he and Hashimoto could have a grand old (but zero-width non-joining) conversation!

j1elo3• 10 months ago

Offtopic, formatting related, and always a fun discussion:

The function signature of [1] ...

  ghostty_input_mods_e ghostty_surface_key_translation_mods(ghostty_surface_t,
                                                            ghostty_input_mods_e);

(^^^ probably not readable in small screens)

... is the perfect example of why "align continuation lines to the open bracket" is the absolute worse option versus the simpler, consistent and only logical choice of "align continuation lines with an extra indentation", aka

    AlignAfterOpenBracket: DontAlign

in Clang-Format [2].

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/f97518cc10059918...

[2] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormatStyleOptions.html#ali...

mitchellh4• 10 months ago

Indeed. Also note this isn't the real public C API. This is, as I noted in the blog post as a disclaimer, an internal-only C API so it is admitedly very ugly.

(I assume you know this, just adding context for other readers)

j1elo3• 10 months ago

Yep, sorry in my mind I was going to mention it (with "even if it's only me seeing private code like this" or something similar) and later forgot after some edits to fix the formatting...

Anyway, I hope it doesn't get lost that this comment was only meant to be half informative, half public statement, and half a light joke :)

orobus• 10 months ago

I can’t figure out how to get the visidata frequency analysis histograms to render properly. Some render as blocks as expected but others are those diamond-question marks. I know it’s a silly hang up but it’s what’s keeping me on iterm. It’s seemingly impossible to search for (or at least I haven’t figured out the right keywords) to troubleshoot too.

icecheese• 10 months ago

Sounds like perhaps your main and fallback fonts are missing the Code Points in question.

I am not a ghostty user, but I think it has a setting for that, if you can figure out which font iTerm2 is rendering those glyphs with.

leonim• 10 months ago

Try asking on https://github.com/saulpw/visidata the community there can help.

I am seeing this issue on a Mac with ghostty but not with wezterm, from the same binary. Ghostty shows some correct characters and some diamond-question marks, and a line usually contains one or the other. The ghostty inspector shows the diamonds are not the blocks.

sylens• 10 months ago

ghostty and atuin are two of the first things I put onto any new macOS or Linux machine I use

stogot2• 10 months ago

Newb question: what’s the difference between a terminal and terminal emulator? I’ve never figured that out

teo_zero• 10 months ago

The former is a piece of hardware from the 70s, the latter is software that emulates the former.

stogot2• 10 months ago

I don’t understand as 1970s hardware requires firmware/software to take input/output with the user?

kelsey98765431• 10 months ago

idk why i am the only person that dislikes ghostty, i just have a tendency to put my machines under heavy load and keep using the cli and ghostty chugs super super badly when there's any gpu or cpu load, especially compared to "slow" terminals. zero issues with iterm2 on macos or gnome terminal on linux under load but that plus zero bells or whistles makes ghostty seem like a purposeless toy to me.

SafeDusk• 10 months ago

Terminal and shell are becoming more and more important with the advent of coding agents, the graphical progress bar is a super nice touch too

bmurphy1976• 10 months ago

I'm really digging Ghosty's shaders. It finally feels like a gimmicky terminal done right. Want a Fallout or CRT theme without compromising on other features? You can finally have it. It brings back memories of the early days of Linux when everything was fun and not trying to mimic the most bland OS out there. Think Enlightenment before everything got gnomified.

mmaunder• 10 months ago

Great project for anyone creating a hobbyist OS.

zeeqeen• 10 months ago

It is Ghostty that makes me believe Zig is ready for industry, and I also want to make a game engine targeting Android and iOS first, however, JNI is really annoying and I hate Google Android. I have tried Bevy for Android and as you can see it's not the fault of game engine but Google. So, use Unity or challenge it. Just do it, thanks Gostty!

jasonm23• 10 months ago

WezTerm seems to be missing from the list, and is a superset of those listed.

dismalaf• 10 months ago

I'm excited for libghostty. Ghostty has a few design decisions I'm not a fan of, but being able to make my own terminal program or embed a terminal into any app with libghostty is a potential gamechanger.

jwr• 10 months ago

Ghostty is amazing. The attention to detail means that the basics work right, which I couldn't say about any other "modern" terminal apps. I still wish for xterm-like text selection, but otherwise this is the best terminal out there, at least on macOS (Apple Terminal.app is second).

Hnus• 10 months ago

I would love to use Ghostty but it renders fonts so ugly on external monitors its impossible to use https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/4504

vidarh• 10 months ago

I love the idea, and I'm doing something similar in Ruby (which, yes, means it will be far less universal than a compiled library; that's an intentional tradeoff - I don't need it to be universal, and even less so when someone is willing to invest far more effort into something that is universal) inspired by AmigaOS, where a terminal window was easily accessible to any application whether it was started from the terminal or not, by opening a file handle to "CON:" (which meant e.g. scripts could also pipe this directly into a newly opened terminal window).

It's one of a few "lost capabilities" of AmigaOS I'm glad to see getting addressed. You can of course fix this today by using one of a variety of terminal widgets, but the ease of being able to just spin up a full terminal window from "anywhere" was very powerful for simple utilities etc.

emadda• 10 months ago

I built a macOS app [1] (to fuzzy search Apple Notes) using Ghostty as a base so that I could use its fast rendering for large lists.

I think there is space for an Electron-like framework but for standalone terminal apps. Looking forward to using Ghostty as a library.

[1] https://enzom.dev/hot-notes/

unmotivated-hmn• 10 months ago

I've been meaning to build something with this[1], maybe you'll use it before I get to it.

[1] https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea?tab=readme-ov-fil...

greg7mdp• 10 months ago

All of this is packaged up into a single zero-dependency C API (it doesn't even rely on libc), allowing it to be easily embedded into any popular language ecosystem.

@mitchellh That's super exciting. I'm wondering how easy it would be to integrate in the debugger frontend I'm working on. Do you already know what the C API will look like?

znpy• 10 months ago

I love this. I've been thinking about writing a clone of SecureCRT (great terminal emulator, sadly greatly expensive as well) for years.

If I could "just" use libghostty, that would be great!

mrinterweb• 10 months ago

I want to like Ghosty, but not being able to search has been a deal breaker. Guess the alternatives to search are use tmux or grep the ghosty log, but tmux and I have never clicked, and searching the log is not user friendly for how often I find myself wanting to search terminal history. Ghosty has a lot of features I would want, but somehow it is missing search. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghostty/comments/1i0g2ge/how_to_fin...

Maybe this concern doesn't apply to libghostty, as I think search would be more of a UI concern.

grogers• 10 months ago

Several years ago I was crazy frustrated with how slow 'less' is for some things (regex search and handling long lines) and was slowing down my day to day operations work. I very briefly entertained an idea to write my own pager to fix those problems but it would have been way too complex to do in my spare time. If libghostty existed then it might have been a different story. If libghostty is done well I think it could be an enabler for many types of terminal applications. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Libghostty is coming

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