> Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth

Can you please explain what this means? I have Ghostty installed just as a backup to use when I have terminal saturation in my default (MacOS Terminal). But other than being super responsive, I don’t know why people love it so. Perhaps I’m missing something large and compelling.

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B4uler5 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I assume the quote is referring to libghostty. In which case a lot of different tools like vs code, Emacs, Gvim, Intellij and other IDEs, even web consoles on stuff like Azure essentially use and reimplement the same core, the idea behind libghostty is to replace those with a common component where long term development can better support the needs of all terminals.

In terms of ghostty itself its just a highly competent use of libghostty, Mitchell’s message above about it being a tech demo is tongue and cheek, but its not far off from the truth. It is just a really solid no bells and whistles, bar excellent execution, terminal emulator that uses libghostty.

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sigbottle 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Terminal state machine parsing is a very tricky thing, especially when you have people defining arbitrary protocols to interact with it. So having one implementation simplifies the development a lot. Of course this buys you into their ecosystem and whatever ghostty specifically supports etc.

A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one

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alemanek 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.

When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.

So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.

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KerrAvon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Really? Claude Code is buggy but not very demanding in terms of rendering -- are you sure the perf issues were local?

	▲	alemanek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I might not be using the correct terms. But, here is what I was seeing: - in a running session text display would slow down intermittently. Like 2-3 words a second - occasionally terminal would stop, some times in the middle of showing a response, and would need to restart the terminal to get it back. But I tailed the session logs and Claude code didn’t think anything was amiss. It was proceeding like normal After switching to Ghostty these issues went away and has been rock solid since then. EDIT: formatting