I Tried the Ghostty Terminal on Linux. Does It Live Up to Its Hype?
The Ghostty terminal has created some noise in the Linux community. As a Linux user who loves exploring new tools, I just had to give it a shot. It had some cool features I wanted to explore. But is it worth replacing your terminal? Let's find out.
What is Ghostty?
Ghostty is a modern terminal emulator created as a passion project by Mitchell Hashimoto. It's designed to be fast, feature-rich, and fully native to both Linux and macOS. It seeks to provide a seamless and highly integrated experience for power users.
Ghostty stands out with its native UI approach, using platform-specific technologies. Swift, AppKit, and SwiftUI on macOS, and Zig with GTK4 on Linux. It supports essential terminal features like the Kitty graphics protocol, hyperlinking, and light/dark mode notifications. Moreover, it offers application-level functionalities such as native tabs, split views, and a drop-down terminal on macOS. Performance is also a major focus, with optimizations for fast startup, smooth scrolling, and high input/output throughput.
OMG Ubuntu:
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Ghostty Update Adds Server-Side Decoration Support on Linux - OMG! Ubuntu
For those unfamiliar with it, Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator written in Zig. It offers a “fast, feature-rich, and native” experience — doesn’t claim to be faster, more featured, or go deeper than other native terminals, just offer a competitive combo of the three.
Given it does pretty much everything other terminal emulators do, fans faithful to more established terminal emulators won’t find Ghostty‘s presence spooks ’em into switching. It’s a passion project there to be used (or not) depending on need, taste, or wont.
Its first release late last year made a frighteningly good impression on me, leaving me keen to see how the app’s development continues going forward.
This article isn’t a recap of Ghostty’s core features and USPs, though. It’s a look at what’s new in the latest release, Ghostty 1.1.0.