It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty

I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.

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anotherevan a day ago | parent | next [-]

The ctrl-tab tab switching behaviour being round-robin instead of stack[1] is what is keeping me on Konsole. None of the newer consoles (for Linux) seem to have this.

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2393

	▲	throwaway2037 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I can see that both styles could be useful to different types of users. Why not make it an option?

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wickrom a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.

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dust-jacket a day ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not the commenter, but for me ghostty was good for being a Very Good terminal experience with almost no config required.

Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.

	▲	zemnl a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Same for me. My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else. I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
	▲	ngrilly a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Same. Almost everything works out of the box, with great defaults.

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noisy_boy a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seconded. I keep hearing about ghostty but I have yet to see a strong enough justification about how it is _that_ better. I use konsole and has significantly more user friendly screen to manage settings. I heard about ghostty's performance so I did some timing tests and ghostty was faster than konsole but not that much - not in any perceptibly significant measurable sense.

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warmwaffles a day ago | parent | next [-]

I went from Alacritty to Ghostty for ligatures and some other small goodies. I could probably get those same goodies with Kitty, but I didn't want to try nor have the desire to try. I may go back to Alacritty if I grow tired of Ghostty.

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robocat a day ago | parent [-]

I've always found ligatures (fi, ff, ffi etc) really ugly. Or are you talking about using them for hacked purposes (-> in C)?

Then again I don't put different foods on my fork when eating - which seems relevant.

	▲	warmwaffles 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`==`, `===`, `->`, `-->` are more pleasant to read with ligatures on. It's silly, but nice.

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beepbooptheory a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I never got the speed thing. Ghostty at least seems slower on my machine compared to foot(client).

	▲	MMMaellon a day ago \| parent [-]
		I tested kitty, foot, and ghostty on my machine when picking a terminal and ghostty was the slowest of the 3. I'm using kitty now. YMMV because this is just one data point (but the most important data point for me)

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binarin a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

libghostty is a bigger contribution, it's being embedded left and right.

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hack1312 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i switched from iTerm 2 on macOS because it would get bogged down sometimes or occasionally lag. it’s been noticeably faster and i appreciate the file-based config as well as the defaults, leading to my config being under 5 lines.

on linux i use the default terminal in gnome which is ptyxis now iirc and haven’t felt any need to switch.

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copperx a day ago | parent [-]

Don't you miss the crazy configuration options that iterm2 has?

	▲	hack1312 a day ago \| parent [-]
		the craziest thing i did with its config was to swap the profile being used based on the pattern of the instance’s hostname the terminal was logged into. The idea was to make the terminal background red on production hosts to give a visual indicator to avoid running anything destructive on prod hosts.

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rofrol a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Splits can have different font sizes

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johnwheeler a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use Ghost TTY coming from iTerm for no other reason than I saw everybody else using and praising it.

Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.

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neobrain a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Is there some special feature I'm missing? I would only call it a marginal improvement. If that. I fail to see what the big deal is.

Among the "GPU rendered terminal" options, afaik Ghostty is the only one that has proper search/context menus, tabs, and scroll bars. I'm sure it's easy to get by without, but compared to the overall value-add of these terminals (which exists indeed but isn't tremendous either) I find it quite a significant downgrade, so I appreciate that Ghostty has both.

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novafunc a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me,

* available on Linux and macOS

* settings easy to transfer, just a file

* comes with Jetbrains Mono Nerd font built-in, no need to install it separately

* supports ligatures

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fridder a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I personally like how I barely had to configure it, how nerd fonts just worked, and how nicely it renders text

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mixmastamyk a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s not quite finished, give it time to mature. But pretty good already.

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johnwheeler a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it's a good polished piece of software no doubt. I'm not denying that, but the hype it gets is just... I don't know.

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mixmastamyk a day ago | parent [-]

Agreed, though it hasn’t been excessive in my experience. Just that the devs are better at marketing than others. Really shows how important that side of the equation is. Wish I was better at it myself.

	▲	abnercoimbre a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Just that the devs are better at marketing than others. I will "quietly" self-plug Terminal Click [0] because Ghostty and TC have discussed their differences in the past (check out the Media page.) I'm definitely not ready to do splashes of any kind, because what Ghostty lacks in novelty Terminal Click lacks in polish. [0] https://terminal.click

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kyrra a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

input latency. the time from pressing a key to showing on-screen is much lower with ghostty (I can't find exact number, but it seems to handle input 2-4x quicker. So around 15ms instead of 60ms).

Also just the general render pipeline is way faster in ghostty. There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Ghostty is attempting to improve the experience to allow for more things to be built in the terminal.

	▲	rafram a day ago \| parent [-]
		> input latency. I guess, but I have a hard time caring about 1/22 of a second of additional latency when iTerm works so well overall. > There are things you just can't do in iTerm because it's so slow. Such as?

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rofrol a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Splits can have different font sizes

	▲	saila a day ago \| parent [-]
		This doesn't seem like a particularly compelling feature to me, but iTerm can do this too (since the person you replied to mentioned iTerm, this seems relevant).

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pelasaco a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty

Is that meant as an argument in favor of "another $400k for Zig" or against it?

I like Ghostty, but investing $800k to develop a programming language that is primarily known for producing a terminal emulator doesn't sound like a particularly strong argument in its favor.

Genuine question. I’m not trolling.

	▲	Lerc a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's just a recognition of things done. If there is a greater message, most people could probably put a similar amount of work on a project for the community. Not many can write a lege cheque for a cause. Many who can, do so and consider their job done. It's a credit for someone to be able to do one but choose to do both.