Ghostty terminal is out!

Cool project and... no screenshots? 😭
Every. Damn. Time.

What are the differences between all of these terminals?

It's ridiculous how much time people are spending performance optimizing terminals.

xterm on a 120MHz Pentium on X11 in the 90s performed "fine".

Hacker news users seem happy with its performance, so will try tomorrow. Fun with new terminals.

Looking at ghostty-git in AUR, zig is built on haskell? With 221 haskell libraries.

And what does it need pandoc-cli and hslua-cli for?

Looked at it, interesting, no package, installed cosmic-term instead

Uses alacritty under the hood, with tabs and tiles!

For those that are, for some reason, incredulous of having more performant software (???), here's a simple program to demonstrate the point:

use std::{
    fs::File,
    io::{BufWriter, Write},
};

fn main() {
    let buf = File::create("/dev/stdout").unwrap();
    let mut w = BufWriter::new(buf);
    let mut i = 0;

    while i <= 100000 {
        writeln!(&mut w, "{}", i).unwrap();
        i += 1;
    }
}

It simply prints the numbers 0-100000 to the screen. Compile it (rustc path-to-file). Run it in a non-accelerated terminal with time ./path-to-bin. Now time that same binary in a terminal emulator with GPU-acceleration.

The difference becomes more apparent with more text. Now, imagine needing to use something like find on a large set of files. Doing this on a non-accelerated terminal is literally slower.

It's fine if you don't need a GPU-accelerated terminal, but having acceleration is genuinely useful and a noticeable quality-of-life improvement if you do anything more than just basic CLI usage.

It’s awesome to see a project written with Zig!

Thought out choice but disappointing nevertheless:

My stance for now is that Ghostty will not support sixels.

• https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2496

Hm... I don't see it stating anything about wayland, but since it says "native" in some many places, I need to assume it won't use Xwayland, unless specifically told to.

Right? Anyone to confirm?

Hey OP, what is the coolest feature?

Any speed comparison?

thanks but i'm good with st

warning: this is a giant rant lol

Before the rest of my comment, let me be clear, I think this terminal is good, and i have no problems with it. My problem is with the hype.

I simply don't understand the hype whatsoever. First of all, it's not even faster than my current terminal. especially when running cat /dev/random for whatever reason

For the test i ran this rust program i saw in a comment thread somewhere

use std::{
    fs::File,
    io::{BufWriter, Write},
};

fn main() {
    let buf = File::create("/dev/stdout").unwrap();
    let mut w = BufWriter::new(buf);
    let mut i = 0;

    while i <= 100000 {
        writeln!(&mut w, "{}", i).unwrap();
        i += 1;
    }
}

compile with rustc to test yourself.

running the binary with hyperfine, i get ~35ms on my current terminal (foot), and ~40ms on ghostty.

The terminal window sizes about the same size, in fact, there were 3 extra lines in foot so it was technically handicapped.

Next is the whole "native ui thing", which sure, if you use gnome, or mac is fine i guess, but what about kde where qt is used. And for me i simply hate title bars so i turned it off immediately and now it looks better.

I do think the tabs are cool, not much to say about that, I wouldn't use them, but for those who do, pretty cool.

I have a similar opinion with the panes, personally i think if you want panes, just use a tiling window manager, or tmux or something, but i also dont really have a problem with this (tmux can be annoying).

If I've missed anything let me know, because I really dont get it.

But does it roll down like Yakuake did before I updated Fedora and broke it? :( That’s all I want.

I must be retarded. People are excited about a terminal emulator. Why?