Agreed. I removed "not a JavaScript approximation of one" from the README.

We spent little time on performance so far, this is more of a POC that will hopefully become a drop-in replacement for xterm.js over time.

I'll swap it over to the new RenderState API and post some benchmarks!

Many kudos to y'all, we were shocked how simple it was to hack this together.

Just fyi, I get no output from "cowsay hello" or "ls", and I see a bunch of errors in the Chrome JS debugger.

This is awesome, thank you!

I'll do this for a much improved demo!

Currently you need the command-line to try it, which is an unfortunate UX.

Yup, that's the idea!

We'd love to (and, tbh, likely will).

Search had been a blocker, but that's coming soon; beyond that not sure that there's any reason other than inertia. Alacritty is totally fine, but excited for the Ghostty focus on performance (obviously), and the font rendering stuff looks excellent (though TBD how much of that we can "just use" vs needing to copy-pasta)

They could certainly compile Ghostty and link into it from Rust. I couldn't imagine it'd be that large of an undertaking.

i switched from alacritty -> ghostty, and occasionally use zed.

i can't recall why i made the transition (maybe just to try it out, and it became default?). i can't think of any practical consequences of this transition.

why do you care about whether zed uses alacritty or ghostty under the hood?

Let me know if you encounter any issues! I'm working on performance benchmarks now.

Ghostty is a terminal like iTerm. This compiles it so it runs in the browser directly, or browser-based environments like VS Code or the Hyper terminal. Without that you’d have to reimplement a whole terminal in JavaScript. Which is what people have been doing with via the xterm.js project. Naturally, there is effort and bugs that go into maintaining a clone/port like that. This lets you use the Ghostty terminal code directly - compiled to WebAssembly and with no other dependencies - as an API-compatible drop-in replacement

That actually pretty much is the ELI5. Its merely a different terminal that offers more features than iTerm2 and also runs on OSX.

Unless you actually need/want those features (which, although I am a terminal aficionado, I must admit are niche as fuck), pick whichever terminal makes you happy. Features that are important to some people are performance, Unicode support, and OS support.

The most decidedly non-ELI5 feature comparison: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2... and https://ucs-detect.readthedocs.io/results.html

I also have ton of questions. Hopefully the author can add more documentation to ghostty. Right now I don't fully understand the use cases or how people may benefit from ghostty.

This runs in the browser, so it would allow you to connect to a server from your browser and render normal terminal commands in that environment

For instance if you're a cloud provider, and you want people to be able to "drop in a shell" on a machine, but make that available through the web, you could use this

Not sure I understand :) it's certainly available in nixos https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/pkgs/by-na...

Will do this!

I'd have to let Mitchell answer this accurately.

Considering the native Ghostty does, I _think_ the answer would be yes? I might tinker around with this and let you know.

Awesome. If you happen to integrate it and find any bugs, please give us a shout!

It should work! Our demo may not (as I haven't tested it, so don't want to advertise it).

It's tricky to do without a compute environment.

We can easily make a browser shell that let's people run basic commands, but presumably most want to try `vim` and other commands they'd typically invoke.

See the comparison: https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web?tab=readme-ov-file#comp...

Ghostty has much better VT100 compatibility. It should have much better performance as well once we optimize.