I'm missing WezTerm from that comparison image/slide posted in the article. Been using WezTerm for almost two years now I think, and I could not be happier. Best terminal emulator hands down.
I second this. WezTerm is very fast (much faster than anything libvterm-based), very featureful (comparable to Kitty), and very configurable (comparable to Vim, if not Emacs itself). Showing fonts the way I like (and not he way macOS defaults to): check. Sending complex key combos as custom sequences: check. Palettes, mouse support, system clipboard support: all check. Selection and search mode: check. Linux, MacOS, and even Windows support: all check!
I wish Ghostty all the luck, because the current state of terminal emulators is a pretty high bar to clear.
Looking forward to this! Had been lurking in the discord for a while but never talked much so I never was able to get a beta key. The Terminal Inspector seems super cool and is what I'm most excited to try out. Seems like it'd be really useful for Bubble Tea [0] apps which I've been having run writing.
Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternatives like Warp, Hyper or Alacritty. And speed or snappy-ness were never an issue with iTerm.
Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features.
Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same.
It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.
I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast.
Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it).
BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...
On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff.
I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.
Can I click on paths to have them opened in my editor of choice? That's the killer feature that always brings me back to iTerm: clicking on paths in the output of various command line tools to directly jump to the line in e.g. source code.
iTerm runs a command with filename, line number, pwd etc. as parameters when you click a path. You can use so called shell extensions to let iTerm add hostname and user to those parameters. I usually grab those and point my editor to the appropriate share or sshfs mount. With vim you can seamlessly use rsync or scp.
I've been daily driving Ghostty for over a year now, and have been a somewhat regular contributor. As a TUI library author, I've worked with several terminal authors on bug fixes and implementing features - Mitchell is among the nicest to work with. Happy to see this project launch as 1.0!
Ghostty has my daily driver for a good while now, I’ve been super happy with it. It’s been especially fun watching Mitchell deftly build a community at just the right speed for its development stage. Thank you for all your hard work and responsiveness.
Excited for this. I’ve played around with iTerm alternatives but always came back because the replacements never felt native, which ultimately slowed down my workflow more than the speed boosts helped.
If GTK+libadwaita is "native" for linux, then give me a custom UI. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember when every program rolled its own UI. It sucked, but modern GTK is in many ways worse.
Excited to try this! Hoping it is fairly low-configuration; a lot of the iTerm alternatives seem to require more configuration than I care to do in order to make them look halfway decent.
How does this compare to Tera Term? I thought that was supposed to be the best terminal emulator? I just seen it mentioned in some PDP restoration videos.
Can it connect to a serial port? I need a terminal to connect to a UART on embedded devices. This should be basic functionality on any terminal, but many don't seem to have it, they're just fancy local shells.
I feel like I'm missing something, too. I use iTerm and XFCE Terminal... Speed is something I never think about in my usage. I tried going back to Xterm just to see how blazingly fast it was and I couldn't really tell much difference. Maybe I'm just not attuned. :)
I'm missing WezTerm from that comparison image/slide posted in the article. Been using WezTerm for almost two years now I think, and I could not be happier. Best terminal emulator hands down.
I second this. WezTerm is very fast (much faster than anything libvterm-based), very featureful (comparable to Kitty), and very configurable (comparable to Vim, if not Emacs itself). Showing fonts the way I like (and not he way macOS defaults to): check. Sending complex key combos as custom sequences: check. Palettes, mouse support, system clipboard support: all check. Selection and search mode: check. Linux, MacOS, and even Windows support: all check!
I wish Ghostty all the luck, because the current state of terminal emulators is a pretty high bar to clear.
Looking forward to this! Had been lurking in the discord for a while but never talked much so I never was able to get a beta key. The Terminal Inspector seems super cool and is what I'm most excited to try out. Seems like it'd be really useful for Bubble Tea [0] apps which I've been having run writing.
[0] https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternatives like Warp, Hyper or Alacritty. And speed or snappy-ness were never an issue with iTerm.
Because iTerm is not fast.
Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features.
Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same.
It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.
> Type something really fast;
I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast.
Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it).
BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...
See e.g. https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/
On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff.
I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.
I can't get it to go slow either, I have a fancy prompt (Starship) and nerdfonts.
Can I click on paths to have them opened in my editor of choice? That's the killer feature that always brings me back to iTerm: clicking on paths in the output of various command line tools to directly jump to the line in e.g. source code.
How would it work under ssh?
iTerm runs a command with filename, line number, pwd etc. as parameters when you click a path. You can use so called shell extensions to let iTerm add hostname and user to those parameters. I usually grab those and point my editor to the appropriate share or sshfs mount. With vim you can seamlessly use rsync or scp.
I've been daily driving Ghostty for over a year now, and have been a somewhat regular contributor. As a TUI library author, I've worked with several terminal authors on bug fixes and implementing features - Mitchell is among the nicest to work with. Happy to see this project launch as 1.0!
Ghostty has my daily driver for a good while now, I’ve been super happy with it. It’s been especially fun watching Mitchell deftly build a community at just the right speed for its development stage. Thank you for all your hard work and responsiveness.
Excited for this. I’ve played around with iTerm alternatives but always came back because the replacements never felt native, which ultimately slowed down my workflow more than the speed boosts helped.
If GTK+libadwaita is "native" for linux, then give me a custom UI. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and remember when every program rolled its own UI. It sucked, but modern GTK is in many ways worse.
Excited to try this! Hoping it is fairly low-configuration; a lot of the iTerm alternatives seem to require more configuration than I care to do in order to make them look halfway decent.
How does this compare to Tera Term? I thought that was supposed to be the best terminal emulator? I just seen it mentioned in some PDP restoration videos.
Amazing piece of software. Have been daily driving the current version of Ghostty for a few weeks on macOS.
Kudos @ Mitchell
Maybe I should try something different than just Terminal.app and Xterm.
Can it connect to a serial port? I need a terminal to connect to a UART on embedded devices. This should be basic functionality on any terminal, but many don't seem to have it, they're just fancy local shells.
Can't wait, thank you Ghislain for this news!!!
iTerm is slow? That's a new one for me...
I feel like I'm missing something, too. I use iTerm and XFCE Terminal... Speed is something I never think about in my usage. I tried going back to Xterm just to see how blazingly fast it was and I couldn't really tell much difference. Maybe I'm just not attuned. :)
Finally. I've been idling in Discord a long time, failing to get into the private beta.
I'm excited to try it out.
Another ? Both Kitty and WezTerm already feel feel much faster than iTerm atm and feature complete.
I mean it's by Mitchel Hashimoto of Vagrant/Terraform/Consul/Vault/Hashicorp fame so that makes it relevant in it's own right.