RBrbanffy·Dec 29, 2024Submission
Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator
5 points · Open discussionghostty-org
ghostty
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đ» Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
110Distinct people
128Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
64KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
đ» Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
GitHub
Where it is used
- Ghostty Terminal â Ghostty Terminal uses Ghosttyâs WebAssembly terminal engine to power the in-editor terminal. It renders the terminal in a VS Code Webview and hooks to a real shell process. Source
- Ghost Town â Ghost Town uses Ghosttyâs VT100 parser, compiled to WebAssembly, to power its web-based terminal emulator. This provides the terminal parsing engine in the browser. Source
What people are saying
I'm an AI critic, but I use AI every day. In fact, I am an AI researcher and work on making models more capable and powerful (probably where a lot of my criticism stems from).âŠ
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No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mitchellh/vouch · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8âNov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:01:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month128 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2024-12-26 20:41:06 UTC to 2026-10-28 03:23:47 UTC.
Counts come from the repositoryâs dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| Jan 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| Feb 2025 | 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2025 | 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2025 | 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| May 2025 | 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jun 2025 | 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Jul 2025 | 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2025 | 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 4 | 6 |
| Sep 2025 | 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 0 | 13 |
| Oct 2025 | 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| Nov 2025 | 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Dec 2025 | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| Jan 2026 | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 4 | 15 |
| Feb 2026 | 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 4 | 8 |
| Mar 2026 | 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 1 | 11 |
| Apr 2026 | 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 2026 | 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Jun 2026 | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Jul 2026 | 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Aug 2026 | 2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Sep 2026 | 2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 2026 | 2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
What Hacker News says
14 sourcesI took this for a spin today. Coming from a long-time iTerm2 user, the first thing I noticed was how snappy everything feels, especially when resizing the window. The straight-forward configuration was extremely nice as well and can be stored in my dotfiles now (iTerm was a giant dump of XML).
A few things that keep me from switching to it full time:
- Missing search scrollback (cmd+f). This appears to be coming soon: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
- More of a nitpick than anything, but the only way to disable cursor blinking is to disable shell integration. Unfortunately, this means taking away things like native scrolling and likely some other things I don't know about. I see there is a discussion here to possibly address this: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812
I feel like this would be a no-brai
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ner switch for me once the above are addressed.
Everything about it is so polished, itâs hard to believe itâs just a v1.0.0 release!
The only thing Iâm eagerly waiting for now is the implementation of search [1], but otherwise, itâs absolutely stellar.!
I set Ghostty as my default terminal emulator now.
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
In Ghostty 1.0Neat, this [1] looks like the project uses vttest [2] to test DEC VT terminal compatibility?
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/TODO.md
[2] https://invisible-island.net/vttest/
In Ghostty 1.0I raised an issue for this: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/3435
In Ghostty 1.0Congratulations!
I was hoping 1.0 would mean CMD+F search would work, but looks like that was pushed back to a later release unfortunately.
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189#issuecomme...
In Ghostty 1.0Congrats on your 1.0 release! Building a term from scratch is no small task. And it looks like after 2 years you already have something I'm seriously considering switching to. That's seriously impressive. And though I'm mostly a Linux supremacist, I genuinely appreciate and respect your dedication to providing native applications on all major platforms. I see too many projects do one of two things: only support one platform at first, with some vague promise of doing others in the future left unfulfilled for years. Or going the easy route of using electron or some other cross-platform toolkit, getting cross-platform support at the cost of a significantly worse experience. There is no substitute for doing the extra work, at the end of the day, and you're already well on your way there at such an early point. Again, I'm impressed!
Now, the o
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ne thing I've coveted for years is a linux term with tmux control mode support, ever since I used iterm2 during my short tenure as a Mac user. I can see from your github issues that this is in the works(https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935), which is great. It looks like a lot of the necessary UI elements are already in place, as well as partial support for the control mode protocol. Do you have any idea how far off this is from being completed? I don't wanna make demands or anything, I know this is a passion project with lots of things still to work on. As far as I know(and I look around quite often) control mode support is still something no existing term for linux supports. Being the first could drive a lot of adoption! I'd also like to offer my help in pushing it over the goal line. I haven't touched Zig, but I'm a polyglot with plenty C experience and Im highly motivated to bring this feature to my Linux systems. Some guidance on things I might do to help would be welcome. The final 3 points of the checklist don't have much detail provided.
Again, no pressure, thanks for all your amazing work, and good luck with continued development!
I'm using ctrl+` :
keybind = global:ctrl+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal
It was the first thing I made sure ghostty supported it before trying it.
Setting the initial height of the quick terminal is under development: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2384
Lack of tab support in the quick terminal is a bummer, but it should come eventually: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2329#issuecomm...
For now, splits are the way to go in the quick terminal.
In Ghostty 1.0I tested it out really quickly, and something is off with Ghostty's font rendering on my machine -- there's extra vertical space between lines. I didn't see any config options for adjusting the line height, just things like `adjust-cell-height`, which squished the whole font, and `adjust-font-baseline`, which moved everything up.
I tried a few searches ('line height', 'vertical spacing') on the GH issues for the project [1], but didn't see anything. I'm sure it's a simple config option or something with my font, but it works out-of-the-box on Alacritty + xterm and others.
I might file an issue if I can nail it down a bit more.
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues
In Ghostty 1.0Upon installing this, I went straight for this part of the documentation:
https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-non-native-f...
Unfortunately the "tabs not working in non-native fullscreen" thing is a dealbreaker for me, so I will be switching back to iTerm 2.
But Ghostty as a whole looks promising. I like zig, zig-objc, MIT license, libghostty, config via text file. I will check back every month or so because I really want to use this. But my hate for macOS native fullscreen outweighs everything else.
Edit: Ok here we go, this is why it's not implemented: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/392#issuecomme...
There's more than one workaround which is superior in my opinion: https://i.imgur.com/iWoqrM0.png
IIRC you can even use AppKit to remove the close/minimize/fullscreen buttons, so it would just be a blank bar.
You
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could go a step further and use private APIs / objc runtime voodoo to set the height of the titlebar to 0. That might outside your design philosophy though.
Also, FYI, clicking the green fullscreen button still uses macOS native fullscreen, so you definitely want to disable that button (which is a public AppKit API) when you have that option enabled
source is open https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
In Ghostty 1.00.13.0
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37...
The full script is pretty much:
$ wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0....
$ tar xvf zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz
$ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git
$ cd ghostty
$ ../zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
$ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty
In Ghostty 1.0