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.